This book still seems to be pretty good, which has kept me interested in it.  The first part of chapter 11 had me a little confused as to what was going on.  So after I read it and then skimmed it again and thought about it, I had a feeling it was symbolic, I just couldn’t figure out how.  So I went to spark notes to see if the book existed there, and it did.  I clicked on chapter 11 and here is the explanation that I got for chapter 11.  Apparently the fact that he awoke in a hospital wearing white and not being able to talk means that he was experiencing rebirth.  He had no recollection of what was going on and he was unable to communicate to anyone anything.  He is not able to tell anyone his name either, giving him a new identity.  As the book goes on he ends up living at a women’s house named Mary.  Mary the virgin mother is the connection given there.  She is sweet and doesn’t make him pay, and she feeds him.  He is sort of wiped of his identity just because he loses his job, and he really doesn’t have anything left. 

Another weird happening that takes place is the yam scene.  It is very long and just about yams.  He sort of is taken back to the south during this portion of the book.  I found it weird to read because it seemed as though he was going to become a person he wanted to be finally, in stead of being what others wanted.  As the reader you finally get the feeling that although this passage is weird, that something good might actually lie ahead of him.  He has a very weird obsession with the food though.  I mean I totally get the whole you bite into something that has a memory with it and you sort of flashback for a minute and it’s a good feeling, but to go and buy to more, or to talk about it for that long is a little weird. 

As the Chapters go on to tell about how he joins this group called the Brotherhood.  The group sees him make a speech at an eviction of an elder couple’s home.  The speech is compelling and although he doesn’t get the response he was going for from the crowd, he gets them motivated and they take action.  The Brotherhood to me just seems like a way to have an identity.  Like a gang almost, it seems as though different people join for different reasons and it’s a way to have a “family”.  They ask weird favors and have weird members.   Eventually they turn there back on the narrator (who does not have a name yet), which was sort of expected.  They got him for a while and got what they wanted out of him, and as soon as he started to get too much attention himself, they got rid of him.

There were some other things in the chapters that caught my attention such as the statue that he breaks and can’t get rid of, the shooting of Clifton while he’s selling the dolls on the street, dumping the spittoon on the priests head, Ras the Exhorter and his personality and what and if he really stands for something else. 

Hopefully some things in this book will be made clearer.  I feel sort of bad for the narrator because he always ends up failing at things.