Ellison obviously delights in wordplay to achieve what he describes as blues-toned laughter. One of the more fascinating aspects of the novel, Ellison's wordplay — allusions, puns, and rhymes as well as powerful metaphors and similes — adds a dimension of literary and cultural richness to the novel.
Ellison bases much of his wordplay on black vernacular, the ordinary language of black Americans, enriched by colloquial expressions and proverbs as well as excerpts from songs and stories rooted in African and African American culture. Vernacular refers to the native form of ordinary language, as opposed to the literary or learned forms. Vernacular includes pronunciation and local dialect. A faucet on the West Coast is a spigot on the East Coast, while heavy traffic in the Midwest becomes gridlock in California.
In Chapter 25, Dupre, providing instructions for burning down the tenement building, warns, "After that it's every tub on its own black bottom!" Ellison might have used the more common and less colorful phrase, After that it's every man for himself, but this would not have grounded the scene in black culture. The two winos use a vivid simile to describe Ras on his horse, "looking like death eating a sandwich." A third example is Trueblood's play on the word whippoorwill: "we'll whip ole Will when we find him."
