Course Hero Invisible Man
The ‘Invisible Man’, by Ralph Ellison, is the one of the finest example of allegorically defining a human mind. The narrator who tells the story in first person is someone who doesn’t wish to be seen by others. He claims that he is ‘invisible’ because no one actually wishes to know his true reality and thus his invisibility is not physical but rather metaphorical, and is a result of other’s refusal to see his true nature.
I feel that the author’s omission in giving a name to his protagonist is also a kind of symbol, which is used in order to affirm the theme of ‘invisibility’ in this novel. As human beings we are generally recognized by our names, and it construes a major part of our personality. A man without a name is unknown, unrecognizable and figuratively ‘invisible’ to another human being. Ellison uses this ploy with expertise in this novel.
The protagonist of Invisible Man is the narrator who is a young man and lives in the time period of sometime between the 1920s and 1930. He lives underground, hiding form the world. He has gone into hiding to write the story of his life, and tell the world about his invisibility.
There is a deep seated apprehension in his mind of him being discriminated due to his black color. His grandparents were freed slaves and his grandfather taught their family the lessons of meekness and humbleness towards the white men, in order to live peacefully amongst them.
However on his deathbed all his bitterness pours forth and he confesses to be using this ploy to survive peacefully under the domination of white men. He teaches them to be as docile as possible, and to kill them softly by always saying yes to them.
The narrator accedes to his grandfather’s advice, and lives a quiet life without dissenting to the white men. He does receive praises from the white men, but he also feels the treachery of being so submissive to the general tyranny of white men towards the black people.
The narrator is a talented public speaker who had once delivered a speech at his high school gradation, enforcing submission and humility as solution for the progression of Black Americans. Impressed by his views, the town arranges to invite him one day, to deliver a speech to a group of distinguished white men.
When he gets up to deliver his speech, it is disrupted by the audience who ignores his spoken words and insults him by making him explain himself, when he mistakenly says “social equality” instead of “social responsibility”.
The angry crowd of white men demands a clarification, and he humbly apologizes for his faux pas. Here it is another example of his thoughts and views being ignored and brushed aside as inconsequential. I think this incident affirms the narrator’s idea of being invisible allegorically.
After the speech those men reward him with a briefcase containing a scholarship to a prestigious black college. However, the award also comes along with a humiliation as the narrator is asked, or rather forced to fight in a “battle royal”, in which he has to fight a group of black men who are all blindfolded. However, he loses the last round.
After the fight the blindfolds are removed and the white men force the youths to pick up gold coins and few crumpled bills scattered over a rug. The youths scramble over each other to pick up the coins, only to find that the rug had an electric current running through it. This is the white men’s idea of humiliating the black men.
Perhaps the blindfold was symbolic to the idea of the narrator being under the impression that the white men would be treating them with honor and compassion if they acquiesce to them. In my eyes, the removal of the blindfolds were figuratively telling the narrator that he is still a black man who would be treated with discrimination.
That night the narrator has a dream in which he sees that the scholarship is actually a piece of paper in which these words are scribbled “ To Whom It May Concern…Keep This Nigger Boy Running.” He wakes up with his grandfather’s laughter echoing in his ears.
Getting up with thoughts of his grandfather’s laughter ringing in his ears is an incident that has ominous shades of the narrator’s guilt ridden mind. Deep down he hates being humble and submissive to the oppression of black Americans in the hands of white Americans. Outwardly he follows the discreet way, but feels like a traitor due to his circumspect behaviour.
The fact that his grandfather had left plenty of moral ambiguity for the narrator to deal with, makes his life even more complex. In his grandfather’s confessions there were many questions that were unanswered. As a reader we never learn whom the grandfather feels he has betrayed. Did he betray his family, ancestors and his future generation or did he betray the people of his race? Due to the vague directions that he gave at his death bed, the narrator feels almost a schizophrenic confusion regarding his own convictions.
He is instructed to maintain a facade of humbleness and acquiescence, and is also directed to keep alive the bitterness and resentment against their imposed fakeness.
This mask of subterfuge is used as self protection, and also enforces a split personality for his descendents. However the narrator in ‘The Invisible Man’ feels that being in such a state of split identity is more difficult to keep up with, and he decides to be genuinely subservient to the white men, despite his grandfather’s warnings. He does succeed in winning the approval of white men by maintaining this belief, but although the white men reward him with scholarship they also assert their superiority by taking advantage of his passivity.
They ask him to take part in a degrading fight and it seems as a sort of payback for their reward. The blindfolds establishes the black men’s refusal to see the motive of racial discrimination of the white men. On the other hand the stereotypical notion nurtured by the white men, that every black man is a beast who is violent, savage and oversexed, is implemented here in this incident.
The fact that the gold coins for which the black boys were made to pummel each other savagely, turn out to be fake copper coins is another example of the misguided belief of the black men. The painful electric currents through the rug were the white men’s way of showing them that they are lesser human beings who deserve to go through physical torture and mental humiliation.
The narrator’s belief goes through many stages as he realizes that all he is considered is a good slave, no matter how humble obedient and cooperative he is to the white men.
By taking the narrator through such experiences, Ellison is emphasizing the fact that every person has to learn to be an assertive and self respecting individual within and against these racial discriminations and social boundaries.
In his essay, “A critical look at Ellison’s fiction and at social and Literary Criticism by and about the author” (Black World, December1970), Earnest Kaiser says, ‘It’s a novel about innocence and human error, a struggle through illusion to reality. “The hero’s identity or social role is always defined by others and they kept him running”.
Ellison said. His enlightenment and some voice in his destiny came when the hero got rid of his old identities and illusions. Written during the period of communist hysteria and McCarthyism, Ellison had his black hero tricked by his so called Communist duplicity.
The book devotes far more space to this one thing that it does to any other injustices visited upon the hero by whites. “The hero’s invisibility is not a matter of being seen,” says Ellison, “ but a refusal to run the risk of his own humanity, which involves guilt.
This is not an attack upon white society! It is what the hero refuses to do in each section which leads to further action. He must assert and achieve his own humanity; he cannot run with the pack and do this—this is the reason for all reversals”.
So there you have the explanation of the novel from the author himself. It is not about Whites’ not seeing Blacks or injustices against Blacks. Its not about Black protest or Black struggle against injustice.’
As the novel progresses, different instances of White men’s condescension and self aggrandizement emerge for the readers. For instance the white millionaire Mr. Norton, who is also one of the founders of the narrator’s college is masquerading as a philanthropist is actually driven by self interest, rather than generosity towards the welfare of black community.
He tells the narrator, “You are my fate.” (Ch. 2, Invisible Man). In this case Norton doesn’t allow the narrator to have a fate of his own, putting a claim of ownership over both their fates. This shows a latent racism in the white man, and he takes pride in his work at the college only because it allows him to control the lives of the students and determine their common fate.
Norton invariably exerts power over the students as he tries to empower their lives. He is another man in the novel who is hiding his true intentions behind a mask, but for different reasons. Here also the invisibility factor becomes obvious as Norton controls the students without them having seen him ever.
His remark to the narrator has rather disturbing undertones, “ You are bound to a great dream and a beautiful monument.” (Ch.2). The word “bound” here has chilling connotations. It invokes image of a shackled slave, who is turned and twisted on the orders of the white man.
There are a series of characters that make the story come to life. Along with the narrator and Mr. Norton, there is Dr. Bledsoe and Brother Jack who become the catalyst in the mainstream narration of the novel. Dr. Bledsoe is the dean of the college and is a Black man. He proves to be a master of masquerades. He wears many masks, as he is shown to be mollifying and almost servile with Mr. Norton, while being domineering and imposing towards the narrator. Dr Bledsoe is what the narrator’s grandfather advised him to be. Practicing duplicity.
The narrator realized while dealing with Dr. Bledsoe, that he manipulates and deceives the white donors to his advantage by acting servile and meek to them; while nurturing a bitterness against the white men, deep down.
At one instance when the narrator finds himself explaining to Dr. Bledsoe that he drove Mr. Norton to old slave quarters only because he was ordered to do so, Dr. Bledsoe burst out indignantly and said, “ Damn what he wants. We take these white folks where we want them to go, we show them what we want them to see.”
The narrator shockingly discovers that Dr. Bledsoe uses his seemingly humble passivity to mask his true aims.
Bledsoe also declares that he has “played the nigger” long and hard, to achieve his present position, and he won’t have a young naïve student defile his accomplishments. This shows that he is another man of mask, who is more bothered about his own image rather than the benefit or welfare of the college students.
The narrator realizes that his grandfather had advised him to use mask of duplicity as a self-protective barrier against the racist white power, but Bledsoe uses this mask against his own race. He demeans the narrator and feels threatened by him. He feels that to save his own carefully manufactured image he must not just deceive the white men, but pull the wool over his own students’ eyes. He ships off the narrator to New York only to preserve his own image.
He cheats the narrator with false hopes, when he sends him off to New York, and feels no compunction over it. The narrator goes with much hopes, thinking that maybe he would find a new life in New York and be able to redeem his future. Much later, and much to his horror the narrator finds that Bledsoe has cheated him by sending him with letters that are written against him and which has degraded and demeaned the narrator. The narrator is filled with thoughts of revenge and bitterness, though his ordeal doesn’t get over until the end.
The author Ellison is trying to drive the point across that the Black Americans can never gain individual status by consorting to a double image. They have to fight against the system by adhering to their self respect and forthrightness.
Here is an excerpt of John Corry’s “ Profile of an American novelist. A White View of Ralph Ellison”
He quotes Ellison, “ I am a novelist not an activist” he says, “ but I think no one who reads what I write, or listen to my lectures can doubt that I am enlisted in the freedom movement. As an individual I am primarily responsible for the health of American literature and culture. When I write, I am trying to create sense out of chaos. To think that a writer must think of his Negroness is to fall into a trap.”
Furthermore, he is disturbed, Ellison says, by the increasing emphasis on Negroness, on blackness, in the civil rights movements. “ It grows out of despair” he says “ it attempts to define Negroes by their pigmentation, not culture. What makes you Negro is having grown up under certain cultural conditions, of having undergone an experience that shapes your culture. There is a body of folklore, a certain sense of American history. There is our psychology and the peculiar circumstances under which we have lived. There is our cuisine, though we don’t admit it, and our forms of expression. I speak certain idioms; this is also part of the concord that makes me a Negro.”
By reading these excerpts from Corry’s essay I have gauged that Ellison is annoyed by the extra hype surrounding the Negro and its cultural implications and he speaks out against the insinuation that they don’t strut anymore. However, he supports it with a tinge of self deprecating humor when he says, “ Negro faggots are the struttingest people I know.” (Black World, December 1970-a special Ralph Ellison issue’)
At the end of the novel when the narrator is pushed into a hole, he is shown to feel more comfortable that what he felt outside in the world amongst respectable white people.
To me it seems as if that black hole was a refuge for the narrator, something, which he couldn’t find in the bright and the so-called highly regarded society.
The Bildungsroman of the narrator is akin to that of Charlotte Bronte’s timid and docile Jane Eyre. She also goes through rites of passage as she discovers the many facets of society and its hollow norms. Jane Eyre was humiliated by her own relatives, while she stayed with them out of compulsion, and likewise in ‘The invisible man’ the narrator has to go through humiliation by a person who belonged to his own race. Practical jokes were played upon him and the public humiliation that he experiences by the white men creates such terror in his subconscious that his dreams are filled with frightened thoughts about his future.
Another masterpiece on racism in America is James Baldwin’s superlative novel, “ Go Tell it on the Mountain”. It is an unrivaled portrayal of human beings caught up in a dramatic struggle and of a society that is going through metamorphosis. This book is classic example of a journey form the rural South to the northern ghetto and the contrasting attitudes of two generations of an embattled family.
Reminds me how these black writers have been able to create such marvelous performance out of these chaos called oppression and racism. To me the dream where he sees a briefcase with a note, “ To whom it may concern- Keep this nigger boy running” is the ominous foretelling of what was to come.
He keeps running in his real life experiences.
“He keeps running. He goes to his college and is expelled for having innocently taken a white donor through a Negro gin mill that also happens to be a brothel. His whole experience is to follow this pattern. Strip down a pretence, whether by choice or accident, and you will suffer penalties, since the rickety structure of Negro respectability rests upon pretence and those who profit from it cannot bear to have the reality exposed (in this case that the college is dependent upon the Northern white millionaire) The boy then leaves for New York where he works in a white paint factory, becomes the soap boxer for the Harlem Communists, the darling of the fellow travelling bohemia, and a big wheel in the Negro world.” (Irving Howe, “Black Boys and Native Sons”, Dissent, 1963)
Ellison’s novel has captured the true essence of a Black man’s gloomy life. His rich and brilliantly inventive theme and characterization has created a story that is unmatched in its portrayal of a Negro’s inner tribulations and surface jauntiness.
To be able to distance himself aesthetically from the experience and write about it simply and cogently, is the task of a writer who has an abundance of talent, apart from his inherent craft.