Throughout the entirety of the beginning of The Sellout, the narrator’s father, Carl Jung, is stuck on the experiments that he has learned about as a Psychologist. He wants to redo the experiments and these different scenarios to see if they are really true. How does one do this? He of course uses he son as the subject of all of the experiments that he wants and plans to conduct. To help Carl out he decided to home-school his son, and “absentminded black lab rat… in strict accordance with Piaget’s theory of cognitive development” (27). This is the path that led to the various experiments that Carl conducted on the narrator.
One such experiment was the recreation of the Obedience Test that Milgram had created to simulate how far a person would go to harm another. In this experiment there was a instructor, in a lab coat, the person who was being watched, and an actor who continued to scream and moan as the watched person would act questions and proceed to shock them if they could them wrong. The point of the experiment was to see just how far in the intensity of the shocks to harm the actor, who was not really connected to anything and was not receiving the shocks.
Carl on the other hand mixed up these experiment and had his son connected to the shocks and also the one to administer the shocks and ask the questions. So instead of being asked the questions or asking the questions and determining whether or not to shock the person answering the narrator had to do all of the above. Also, the intensity of the shocks went up exponentially fast for the narrator from a medium sized voltage to the “XXX” voltage on the machine (32). This experiment is done in a completely different way as the one Milgram began in former years. The fact that Carl is changing the experiments before conducting them is not going to lead him to find the exact same results as the previous experimenter.
These are the types of experiments that the narrator had to grow up enduring and then he may be asked about something that most children learn in school and he would have to say, I don’t know because I wasn’t taught that in school. From the beginning, the narrator did not have a normal childhood. He was raised in his house with just his father and also being experimented on left and right. This leads to an immense emotional problem that could form, especially since he mentions that, “I wasn’t loved,but brought up in an atmosphere of calculated intimacy and intense levels of commitment” (27). These are the reasons that the narrator has made the decisions in his life such as agreeing to let Hominy become his slave or segregating the bus and eventually the school system. These decisions are direct reflections based off of the lack of love he had as a child and even the lack of knowledge he did not gain as a child too. He was always with his father when he was younger either in the house, working on the farm, or attending the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals meetings. He was unable to learn about all the harms that came from segregation and slavery from the beginning, so therefore, he made the mistake of bringing them back into his home town.
I agree that his father’s experiments and questionable parenting style have a profound effect on him, but I do not believe that Beatty presents his father’s lasting influence in a negative way. In fact, I believe that his affinity for scientific thinking and problem solving in the community directly transfers to our protagonist. For example, while Bonbon’s father preoccupies himself by replicating and testing variables in famous psychology experiments, Bonbon applies the same level of thinking to his crops (29-36). The clearest instance of this behavior occurs with the satsuma tree. On his way back from surfing, Bonbon seemingly contemplates the issues of segregation, while his true thoughts lie with his satsuma tree (169-172). He even goes as far as to sing to the satsuma tree, despite never selling the fruits for a profit later in the novel (173). He applies this same personal drive in his pursuit to restore Dickens. This is visible when he comments on the two rival Latino gang members that show up to Hood Day saying, “Maybe the signs that we’d posted in Polynesian Gardens on the way home from the hospital job were working,” (236). In this way, he believes just like with the bus segregation, school segregation, and city demarcation, that his civic efforts are bringing people together albeit in a different method than his father would have preferred.
ReplyDeleteI also his father's experiments interesting. Firstly, it should be noted that not a single experiment given in the book is scientifically valid not to mention horribly unethical. The experiments are consistently designed such that no matter the result the father can't make any scientific conclusions. As a student of psychology it seems unlikely Beatty wouldn't know this. Another interesting point is that all of the experiments have hypotheses related to the African American race. For instance, when testing the bystander effect "Dad hypothesized that this didn't apply to black people, a loving race who depended on each other for survival" (30). Furthermore, the only other people who appear to be interested in an academic approach to blackness are the Dum Dum Donut intellectuals. The book depicts most members of the Dum Dum Donut intellectuals as "closed-minded" and "pompous" (97,98). He goes on to compare their laughter to "Yale University's all-white department of black studies" (100). All these things combined make me think that Beatty has a negative view of African American studies, and perhaps the father's consistently horrible experimentation is just that disdain materializing.
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