Chester Himes Critical Essay | Critical Essay by David Cochran

SOURCE: "So Much Nonsense Must Make Sense: The Black Vision of Chester Himes," in The Midwest Quarterly, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 1, Autumn, 1996, pp. 11-30.

In the following essay, Cochran discusses the portrayal of racial tensions in Himes's fiction and states that "Himes viewed race as a dialectical relationship which progressed toward increasing absurdity."

In the penultimate chapter of Chester Himes's 1969 crime novel Blind Man With A Pistol—the last in his series of stories set in Harlem—the eponymous character makes his first appearance, shooting craps in a small gambling house on a hot summer afternoon. After losing all his money, he walks to the subway station and boards a train. An eccentric pride precludes the man from admitting his blindness to anyone, including himself, and his naturally surly temperament is exacerbated by his gambling losses. On a crowded subway car he sits across from Fat Sam, an embittered black...
(read more)