Irony and Symbolic Action in James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

Abstract

JAMES WELDON JOHNSON'S ONLY NOVEL, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, has divided its readers over the years into two distinct camps. One group, which includes Sterling Brown, Hugh Gloster, David Littlejohn, Stephen Bronz, and Nathan Huggins, feels that Johnson's narrator and his opinions are more or less direct reflections of their author. 1 The other group, whose membership includes Robert Bone, Edward Margolies, Eugenia Collier, Robert Fleming, and Marvin Garrett, argue that Johnson's treatment of his narrator is essentially ironic.2 Such disagreement over a fiction so brief and seemingly simple is remarkable, but not at all unintelligible. As Wayne Booth has pointed out in his Rhetoric of Fiction, the trouble with irony in narrative is that the signposts which indicate its presence are often lost to the reader's sight. Booth delineates these troubles into three broad areas, any one of which is sufficient to make the proper reading of a work problematic. In

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