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ANALYSIS BY CHAPTER
Invisible Man (1952)
Ralph Ellison
(1914-1994)
Ralph Ellison declared modestly in retrospect, “It’s not an important novel. I failed of eloquence and many of the immediate issues are rapidly fading away. If it does last, it will be simply because there are things going on in its depths that are of more permanent interest than on its surface.” On the contrary of course, Invisible Man is an eloquent and very important novel. Although some of the issues have faded away, his art has a depth transcending race. His major theme is timeless: The search for identity is “ the American Dream,” he wrote. “The nature of our society is such that we are prevented from knowing who we are. It is still a young society, and this is an integral part of its development.”
QUOTATIONS
The two epigraphs that introduce the novel are taken from Herman Melville and T. S. Eliot, as Ellison identifies himself with traditional American literature at the highest level of Modernism, rather than with the black protest tradition of Naturalism represented by Richard Wright: “My standards were impossibly high.” The first quotation is from Benito Cereno, ironic exclamations by the captain of an American frigate who comes aboard a Spanish slave ship and is too naively racist to recognize that the slaves have revolted and taken over the ship—the blacks are invisible to him except as slaves. Captain Delano manages to save Captain Cereno, but the Spaniard is traumatized by the horrors of the revolt, having experienced invisibility himself at the hands of the vengeful blacks. His reply to ‘What has cast such a shadow upon you?’ is: “The Negro.” Melville makes the black man the Jungian psychological “shadow” that haunts the white man. The quotation from Eliot expresses with intensity the feeling of invisibility experienced by another white man, again indicating that Invisible Man transcends race.
Man refers to Man. Before Feminists segregated woman from Man, the concept Man was understood to transcend gender as well—as does Wo- man. Ellison illustrates that the Modernist aesthetic value of universality contributes to improving race relations in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., and to gender relations as well—at least among women who have experienced invisibility themselves--in contrast to the Postmodernist separation of people into identity groups, privileging some and demonizing others, as exemplified by Toni Morrison and higher education. Group thinking such as racism and sexism makes the members of differing groups invisible as individuals, as men are to Feminists.
PROLOGUE
The opening sentence of the novel is short like that of Melville’s Moby-Dick , where “Call me Ishmael” suggests that he is keeping his true identity invisible: “I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe…” The allusion to Poe again places the novel in the mainstream tradition of American literature, but this time the black narrator is differentiated from the white writer. Like Benito Cereno, Poe was traumatized by a slave revolt, the one led by Nat Turner not far from Poe’s home in Virginia, in which rebelling slaves murdered over 50 whites.
Poe reacted to the horror by stereotyping blacks as evil primitives in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Ellison continues the rebuttal to Poe that Melville made in Moby-Dick and that Twain made in Huckleberry Finn. Like Moby-Dick Ellison’s novel is a psychological allegory, or what Melville called “an inside narrative”: “I had discovered unrecognized compulsions of my being—even though I could not answer ‘yes’ to their promptings.” Every character in the book can be understood as an “unrecognized compulsion” in the narrator—as in a nightmare. A psychological allegory sets the author free to be Expressionistic in the tradition of medieval dream allegory. Everything is subjective. This disarms any criticism that the book is stereotyping whites, as in the Battle Royal episode, because all characters are
projections of the young narrator’s feelings. Objective reality is established (1) by the opening quotations indicating that invisibility is part of the human condition and not just a problem of blacks; (2) by events; (3) by the implications of dialogue; (4) by accurate correspondence to history as in depicting the Communist Party in Harlem; (5) by the enlightenment of the narrator about his identity symbolized by the many lights in his basement hole; (6) by his manifest psychological growth.
There is transcendence in the narrator’s ability to joke about race—his pun on “spook.” Humor is one of the traditional means of transcendence in black literary history, as exemplified for example by some of the poems of Paul Dunbar at the end of the 19 th^ century. The narrator reinforces the point that invisibility transcends skin color: “Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a biochemical accident to my epidermis.” Today every adult in a modern society has experiences with bureaucrats that could be described much as this narrator describes his experiences as a black man: “When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything except me.” Like him on the streets of New York many people today feel “constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision,” and like him they react in resentment and “begin to bump people back.”
As a black man in the big white city, the narrator epitomizes modern alienation: “You often doubt if you really exist.” His violence dramatizes what is at stake and intensifies the feelings conveyed by his eloquent prose. Insulted by a white man he bumps into accidentally, he demands an apology, is cursed, brutally head butts the man and knocks him down and kicks him repeatedly “in a frenzy because he still uttered insults though his lips were frothy with blood. Oh yes, I kicked him!” He almost kills him. He stops himself from murder by realizing that he is invisible to the man. This episode encapsulates the plot of the novel, which ends with his realizing and transcending his invisibility.
He represents his race allegorically when he says “Most of the time…I am not so overtly violent.” Likewise his fight with the power company is a metaphor of black subversion of a discriminatory society: “I use their service and pay them nothing at all, and they don’t know it.” The main setting is “the jungle of Harlem,” evoking the Naturalism of Richard Wright and other black protest writers. The narrator expresses independence of the deterministic trap of Harlem: “I don’t live in Harlem but in a border area.” In the end, as expressed here in the Prologue, he identifies himself with white as well as black cultural values, calling himself “kin to Ford, Edison and Franklin.” At the same time, allegorically as a representative black man he lives in a building “rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century.” He is the “shadow” repressed and invisible in the collective unconscious of whites, first defined by Melville in Benito Cereno.
Ellison explained his Prologue saying “I wanted a foreshadowing through which I hoped the reader would view the actions which took place in the main body of the book.” The invisible man begins in the basement at the end of his story, narrates 25 chapters of flashback, then returns to his position in the basement in an Epilogue. Circular structures are a recurrent characteristic of Modernism— The Professor’s House , The Sun Also Rises, As I Lay Dying, Finnegans Wake : “the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead” is an echo of T. S. Eliot evoking cyclical renewal in Nature and rebirth of the soul: The narrator compares himself to both a bear in hibernation and an Easter chick that will emerge from its shell in the spring, alluding to Christ. Both comparisons imply eventual rebirth: “I myself…did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility.” The dream in the Prologue “prefigures” characters and events to come, but actually occurs afterward, condensing their meanings in an allegory.
The paragraph emphasizing his inner light--brighter than Broadway—stands out as improvisation. Three parenthetical interruptions and another between dashes mimic the spontaneity of jazz. Ellison played jazz trumpet and said that he improvised in his writing “in the manner of a jazz musician putting a musical theme through a wild star-burst of metamorphosis.” His prose style often mimics improvisational jazz, expressing the free spirit of the narrator after his enlightenment. Thematic motifs such as colors—black, white, red—function like the sounds of musical instruments in a jazz composition. The rhythms and the abundant repetitions in the style owe something also to black pulpit oratory, especially speeches such as the ones at the battle royal and at the eviction in Harlem. The Modernist poet Ezra Pound wrote music and thought poetry should resemble music. Ellison wrote a musical novel.
myself… It took me a long time and much boomeranging of my expectations.” The grandson of slaves, he was raised to believe in the myth of equality. “In my pre-invisible days I visualized myself as a potential Booker T. Washington.” But in fact he takes after his grandfather, who advised him to fight back: “Our life is a war… I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” The preacher in his marijuana vision warned that he might end up “in the WHALE’S BELLY.” Without understanding it the narrator follows his grandfather’s advice “in spite of myself… I was praised by the most lily-white men of the town.” He delivers an Uncle Tom graduation speech declaring that humility is “the very essence of progress,” but he does not believe it—“I only believed that it worked.”
At a smoker for “the town’s leading white citizens”—including the school superintendent and even the pastor—the battle royal is a ritual of racist conditioning. The white men taunt the young black males with a sight of what they can never have, all embodied in “a magnificent blonde—stark naked.” Her eyes smeared with mascara are “the color of a baboon’s butt,” an American flag is tattooed on her belly and “her thighs formed a capital V” for vagina, victory and vulgar. She dances in the cigar smoke, an obscenity reflecting the values of the “leading white citizens.” Some of the white men “threatened us if we looked and others if we did not.” Then the boys must submit to white blindfolds and are forced to fight each other in a boxing ring. “I had no dignity.” They prefigure the rioters in Harlem at the end of the novel: “It was complete anarchy. Everybody fought everybody else… I played one group against the other.”
After the brawl a white man calls the narrator Sambo, like one of the dolls later sold by Tod Clifton. The boys are rewarded with gold coins that turn out to be worthless tokens and bills on an electrified rug that shocks them when they try to pick up their pay. In this episode the narrator represents black history: “It seemed a whole century would pass before I would roll free…heated to the point of explosion.” The battle royal episode intensifies the heat. In T. S. Eliot’s term, this episode is the objective correlative for outrage. On demand, his mouth filling with blood, the narrator gives his humble graduation speech to the drunken white men, who pay no attention. Then some begin to interrupt his progress by shouting questions to intimidate him in an exchange that is the opposite in spirit of a black congregation shouting assents to their preacher. When the narrator affirms “social equality” they turn hostile. Chastened, he swallows blood and changes his phrase to “social responsibility, sir.”
“We mean to do right by you,” says the white man, “but you’ve got to know your place at all times.” For his deference he is rewarded with a briefcase containing a college scholarship. But that night the spirit of his grandfather appears in a dream and reveals the true meaning of the scholarship, its futility, which the boy does not yet understand: “Keep This Nigger-Boy Running.”
2
The college is modeled on Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where Ellison majored in music. The black community romanticizes the school, whereas the narrator senses that the place is actually “a flower-studded wasteland” in the spiritual sense of T. S. Eliot’s famous poem. On campus the one fountain—a symbol of the soul in Hawthorne—is broken and dry. And in his memory no rain falls. He remembers conformity, marching to chapel in uniform with other students, “minds laced up, eyes blind like those of robots to visitors and officials on the low, whitewashed reviewing stand.” The obedient students are blind to what is behind “whitewashed” appearances. The statue of the Founder, corresponding to Booker T. Washington, depicts him lifting a veil from the face of a kneeling slave, but the narrator is unable to decide “whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.” He discovers that he is enrolled in Uncle Tom College.
The influence of the white liberals who fund the school is suggested by the motif of whiteness: white magnolias, the white Home Economics cottage “whiter still in the moonlight” (moonlight traditionally connotes romance) and the “white line” the narrator follows when chauffeuring one of the millionaire founders around, a philanthropist from New England who is compared to Santa Claus—Mr. Norton, “a bearer of the white man’s burden, and for forty years a symbol of the Great Traditions.” Norton asks the narrator if he has studied Emerson, an ardent abolitionist known for advocating self-reliance. “Not yet, sir. We haven’t come to him yet.” This school for black conditioning into white society does not teach self-
reliance. Hence the students are still mentally enslaved. Calling Norton a smoker of cigars associates him with the white town leaders at the battle royal, as does his sexual fantasizing.
Norton tells his driver, an invisible Negro, that “you are my fate, young man.” His image of himself depends on the success of the school. He idealizes his daughter in the tradition of Victorianism (she, moral purity, is dead). In exalting her Norton uses variants of the word pure 5 times. “Her beauty was a well- spring of purest water-of-life.” Since she is dead, this image of her as a fountain corresponds to the dead fountain on campus. “She was too pure for this life” and since she died, “I have never forgiven myself. Everything I’ve done since her passing has been a monument to her memory.” Norton feels guilty for not being as good as he purports to be and he compensates for his secret lusts by idealizing his daughter and with philanthropy, like the liberals in “The Celestial Railroad” (1843) by Hawthorne. Norton the liberal represents White Guilt. His customized form of philanthropy for blacks to redeem himself only makes them dependent on him and keeps them following the “white line.” His shoes are “white, trimmed with black. They were custom made.” Liberals keep blacks down on the plantation.
Norton is a banker who thinks of the school as a factory and the students as investments. The narrator is a test product. “Half-consciously I followed the white line as I drove.” By accident he comes upon the log cabin of Jim Trueblood, a disgraced sharecropper. Norton lacks authenticity himself and grows excited to see a real log cabin “built during slavery times.” Jim is a figurative descendant of Jim in Huckleberry Finn , a simple honest goodhearted black man suffering unjust degradation. He is a True -blood, authentic and natural in himself as a black man. Before his disgrace he “had been well liked as a hard worker and took care of his family’s needs.” He sings spirituals like the old woman in the narrator’s marijuana vision. The narrator and the other students have been so dissociated from their spiritual heritage that “We were embarrassed by the earthy harmonies…the crude, high, plaintively animal sounds that Jim Trueblood made as he led the quartet.” Educated to have contempt and hatred for their own true blood, the students have become self-loathing snobs. “How all of us at the college hated…the ‘peasants,’ during those days! We were trying to lift them up and they, like Trueblood, did everything it seemed to pull us down.”
When he reveals to Norton that Jim Trueblood impregnated his own daughter, the narrator wishes they were “back on the other side of the white line” headed back to the college. He does not want Norton to see this side of black life, but Norton is fascinated, his “blue eyes blazing into the black face with something like envy and indignation.” Ironically, the rich and powerful white man envies what he sees as the liberty of the poor black man, his apparent freedom to do anything he feels like doing—an illusion derived from a stereotype. Trueblood tells him “the biggity school folks up on the hill” offered him money to leave the county, then threatened “to turn the white folks loose on me.” Actually, however, the white folks help and defend Trueblood because he validates their racist stereotype. They are like the “fine white gnats [that] swarmed about his wound.”
Jim explains how it all happened: “It was so cold all of us had to sleep together; me, the old lady and the gal.” It was dark in the cabin. “Black as the middle of a bucket of tar.” The simile evokes the fable of Brer Rabbit and the tar baby and getting stuck. Ironically, Jim was worrying about protecting his daughter from a local boy and then got to recalling an old girlfriend “plump and juicy and kinda switchin’ her tail” who called him Daddy, just like his daughter. He turned his back to his daughter and tried to move away but there was not much room in the bed.
His dream is full of the Freudian symbolism influential in the 1950s, by now familiar. He dreamed he was looking for “some fat meat” and went up a hill to get some. The hill evokes the school on the hill and a female body. The dream contradicts Norton’s stereotype of him as amoral: “I goes through the front door! I knows it’s wrong, but I can’t help it. I goes in and I’m standin’ in a big room full of lighted candles…” He feels like he is trespassing in a mansion of white people—violating a great taboo. “I’m standin’ there knowin’ I got no business in there, but there anyhow. It’s a woman’s room too…and all around me I can smell women, can smell it getting’ stronger all the time.” A white lady steps out of a grandfather clock, epitomizing the forbidden like the dancing blonde at the battle royal. He tries to run away but she grabs and holds onto him. A “flock of little white geese flies out of the bed”—a thrill like an orgasm. “And I cain’t stop—although I got a feelin’ somethin’ is wrong.” He enters the grandfather clock,
Norton merely gets slapped and falls into hysterical shock. Supercargo cannot protect him now. The attendant is a “huge black giant” who serves the white social order against his own people like Bledsoe the college president and Lucius Brockway who tends the boiler in the white paint factory. Like them he wants to keep blacks in their place in order to retain his own position. Supercargo threatens the men with a strait jacket and “You can’t speak your mind when he’s on duty!” Supercargo is “a kind of censor”—superego— who enforces white political correctness: “Sometimes I get so afraid of him I feel that he’s inside my head.” Supercargo gets drunk and strips from his “hard-starched white uniform” to white shorts. The veterans go wild and beat him up. “Men were jumping upon Supercargo with both feet now and I felt such an excitement that I wanted to join them.” They represent more “unrecognized compulsions of my being.” In his own personal hell, one man of mixed blood sees world history as an eternal race war and curses his mulatto mother for being half white, in contrast to the humane ambivalence of the old singer of spirituals in the Prologue and the accommodating Mary Rambo up in Harlem.
Norton unconscious is “a mass of whiteness” representing the white race. “He was like a formless white death” resulting from a race war prefigured by “the madness of the Golden Day.” A real doctor emerges from the chaos and provides some objectivity in the midst of the riot. He calms the narrator down by demystifying Norton: “He’s only a man. Remember that.” He debunks the inflation of Norton into a white God. He helps carry the white man to a bed and tends to him as a professional. Ellison emphasizes the diversity of black responses to Norton. One black prostitute even sees him as innocent and cute, “Just like a little white baby,” whereas another stereotypes him as a greedy white man with monkey glands and goat balls: “These old bastards don’t never git enough. They want to have the whole world.”
The doctor calls Norton a “trustee of consciousness” and counters him with advice intended to save the narrator: “Perhaps had I overheard some of what I’m about to tell you when I was a student up there on the hill, I wouldn’t be the casualty that I am.” The doctor served with the Army Medical Corps in World War I—tending many white soldiers—then he practiced medicine in France. He performed successful brain surgeries but he could not change the minds of white citizens when he returned to America. They beat him with whips and he finally took refuge in the mental asylum: “I learned along with the ulcers that my work could bring me no dignity.” Now, he summarizes the social meaning of Norton to blacks: “To some, you are the great white father; to others the lyncher of souls.
When the young narrator does not understand how Norton could be a lyncher, the doctor diagnoses him: “Behold! A walking zombie! Already he’s learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He’s invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir! The mechanical man!… To you, he is a mark on the scorecard of your achievement, a thing and not a man… He believes in the false wisdom taught slaves and pragmatists alike, that white is right. I can tell you his destiny. He’ll do your bidding, and for that his blindness is his chief asset.” In the end, even the doctor boomerangs and sounds like Ras the Destroyer: “Get out before I do you both the favor of bashing in your heads.” A prostitute adds, “If he’s too good for me, let him pay!” When the narrator finally gets the angry Mr. Norton back into the car, he smells cigar smoke, again associating the white philanthropist with the white town leaders at the battle royal. 4
The steering wheel feels alien because he is simply going where the road goes and has no real control. As the doctor said, he is a mechanical man following “the white line.” Ironically, he blames “Damn Trueblood. It was his fault…. Here within this quiet greenness I possessed the only identity I had ever known, and I was losing it.” He wants to plead with Norton like “a child before his parent… I believed in the principles of the Founder with all my heart and soul.” He envisions the campus as “a world of whiteness,” taking Norton to his rooms in a building “with white pillars like those of an old plantation manor house.” The liberal benefactor is paralleled to a slaveowner on an old plantation.
Dr. Bledsoe is the opposite of the honest doctor in the Golden Day: “he was the example of everything I hoped to be: Influential with wealthy men all over the country; consulted in matters concerning the race; a leader of his people; the possessor of not one, but two Cadillacs, a good salary and a soft, good-looking and creamy-complexioned wife.” Dr. Bledsoe drains black students of their true blood, living off them like a vampire, while also evoking the antiquated medical practice of bleeding patients with leeches. Further,
Norton is a faith “healer” who uses Bledsoe the leech to do the bleeding. Bledsoe has been corrupted by the acquisitive materialism, selfishness, envy, lust and greed prevailing in white society.
Ironically, Bledsoe looks at the invisible black boy “as though I’d suddenly told him black was white.” Bledsoe puts on a “bland mask” to confront the angry Norton. Masking is a motif in black literature, appearing for example in the 19 th-century poem by Paul Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask” (1892). The old plantation building where Norton stays is implicitly compared to a “feudal castle” in a goldfish bowl. Later Bledsoe says, “I’m still king down here.” However, Norton dictates to Bledsoe like a feudal king to a servant, judging a peasant. The benevolent liberal absolves the narrator of responsibility for his unpleasant experiences, but he also says, “You may send him away, we won’t need him now.”
The plea of the narrator is a traditional major theme in Naturalism, as in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940): “But it was out of my control, sir.” The red sun “lighting the campus” is an Impressionist metaphor of President Bledsoe’s anger and of the narrator’s anger at the doctor in the Golden Day: “He had made Mr. Norton angry.” When Norton tells him “I have explained to Dr. Bledsoe that you were not at fault,” the narrator is so relieved that, like a dependent child, he sees him as a Santa Claus. He promises to read Emerson. “Very good,” says Norton deceptively. “Self-reliance is a most worthy virtue.”
5
The dark asphalt drives on campus are lined with “whitewashed stones.” Evoking a southern plantation under “the new dispensation,” the prose style becomes Faulknerian as in Absalom, Absalom! The moon over the campus is not romantic, it is “a white man’s bloodshot eye.” The choir members in the chapel wear uniforms of black and white, the students’ faces are “frozen in solemn masks.” And the narrator seems to hear already their voices “mechanically” raised. The narrator has been taught to prefer educated preachers purged (bled) of “that wild emotion of the crude preachers most of us knew in our home towns and of whom we were deeply ashamed.” Feeling superior to people who do not go to college is characteristic of college students regardless of race, but the effects of elitist snobbery on the lower-class black population caused a catastrophic backlash against education in general, especially among young black males, making them more invisible.
The college replaces the black cultural heritage with the “black rite of Horatio Alger”—the white myth that anyone who works hard can get ahead in America, which is nullified by the underlying message: “the staggering folly of our impatience to rise even higher.” Mocking in retrospect, he calls the campus “this Eden,” making him an American Adam who loses his innocence. He finds the liberal whites’ “regard for our welfare marked by an almost benign and impersonal indifference.” Nevertheless, he becomes a student leader and tries to inspire his fellow students to believe in the Horatio Alger myth—“the promise.” He is like Ellison “a bugler of words, imitating the trumpet and the trombone’s timbre, playing the thematic variations like a baritone horn.”
The enlightened narrator satirizes himself as he was before his enlightenment like Joyce does through Stephen Daedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). In italics, with Expressionistic passion he mocks himself for “blaring triumphant sounds empty of triumphs” and “counterfeit notes singing achievements yet unachieved”—“the mere echoes noise of the promise.” He refers to words as “sounds” rather than concepts and as a speaker he made “more sound than sense.” Nevertheless, he has retained his true blood, his only hope of attaining an authentic identity. He speaks in the emotional rhythms of the old black preachers rather than like those schooled to suppress themselves. Though deluded by the Horatio Alger myth, he is sincere. His words rise from his soul—“my fountain, like bright-colored balls in a water spout.” His fountain contrasts with the dry broken fountain on campus and his water spout sustains the whale motif and is a metaphor of the spirit used by Melville in Moby-Dick (1851). In search of authenticity he addresses himself not to the faculty or students of the college but to the former slave, the very old Miss Susie Gresham in the back row of his audience, looking to her for inspiration and approval, a “relic of slavery whom the campus loved but did not understand.”
In his deference to white guests on the platform of the chapel, Dr. Bledsoe has the decorum not of a college president but of “a portly head waiter” who “managed to make himself look humble.” Yet to the
Accordingly, Homer Barbee is from Chicago and Bledsoe orders the narrator to go to New York, indicating that he can return to the college next Fall. But the narrator feels expelled and ashamed and goes outside and vomits on the campus, hearing the sound of an old piano playing the blues out of tune. “I would never live down my disgrace.” Haunted by his grandfather, he accepts responsibility for what happened. Again he faces Bledsoe, who makes “a cage of his fingers.” Touching the shackle from slavery days on his desk, Bledsoe agrees to give him letters of introduction, supposedly to help him get a job. The letters will be sealed, however, and he must promise not to open them.
7
The invisible man boards a bus to New York with a “white driver.” He is surprised to see the honest doctor from the Golden Day, the supposedly crazy vet, seated at the back of the bus in custody—“only the rear was reserved for us.” He would rather avoid the wise doctor: “I wanted to remember nothing connected with Trueblood or the Golden Day.” Ironically, up North in Harlem he will experience true blood and riot on a much larger scale than down here in the South. Paradoxically, in trying to run away, the invisible man will discover himself.
Like most American dreamers he is motivated by money: “I thought I’d make more money in New York.” The realistic veteran comments on the Great Migration: “New York!… That’s not a place, it’s a dream. When I was your age it was Chicago”—represented by Barbee. “Now all the black boys run away to New York. Out of the fire into the melting pot… Deep down you’re thinking about the freedom you’ve heard about up North… But for God’s sake, learn to look beneath the surface… Come out of the fog, young man…. Play the game, but don’t believe in it.” This prefigures the fog later and is the same advice that he got from his grandfather.
The vet uses the puppet metaphor that is a motif culminating in Tod Clifton’s Sambo dolls: “the white folks, authority, the gods, fate, circumstances—the force that pulls your strings until you refuse to be pulled any more.” The first part of his statement is deterministic Naturalism in the tradition of Richard Wright, attributing Godlike power to whites, as the rioters do to Norton in the Golden Day. Politically, this is defeatism—merely playing the game. But the vet concludes with an assertion of freedom to choose, to “refuse to be pulled any more.” And he allows that “You might even beat the game.” This view is Existentialism, transcending deterministic forces, as is the vet’s final advice, “And remember, the world is possibility if only you’ll discover it.” The vet embodies the transition from defeatist Naturalism to Existential transcendence—Wright to Ellison.
With irony, the vet exults in the young man’s assertion of freedom in going to New York alone at his age: “I can remember when young fellows like him had first to commit a crime, or be accused of one, before they tried such a thing.” This alludes to Richard Wright’s story “The Man Who Was almost a Man.” As he approaches New York, encouraged by his letters of recommendation, the narrator becomes optimistic again and plans to return to the college in the Fall: “I dreamed with my eyes gazing blankly upon the landscape.” However, on the subway he gets crushed against other passengers, a woman in particular—“I was trapped.” As a black man, he is more vulnerable to accusations—more deterministic forces. The subway car lurches him into movements “against my will.”
At a Harlem station he is impelled out the door “feeling like something regurgitated from the belly of a frantic whale.” After sinning against the God of Bledsoe, he is saved from being swallowed by a whale like Jonah in the Bible—by the true blood of Harlem: “I had never seen so many black people… My courage returned… The vet had been right: For me this was not a city of realities, but of dreams.” He comes upon a gathering around a speaker called Ras who is “shaking his fist angrily over the uplifted faces.” Ras personifies violent rebellion—a dream--extending the theme of rioting dramatized in the Golden Day: “It was as though a riot would break out any minute.” This scene intensifies the tone of the novel and suspense increases as the action builds toward the final riot in Harlem.
Again the style is plain and simple with a concrete Realism that contrasts with the invisible man’s Romantic dreams, his illusions about Bledsoe’s letters, and his youthful vanity: “Finally, I went to the mirror and gave myself an admiring smile as I spread the letters upon the dresser like a hand of high trump cards.” He decides he must change his “colored people” sense of time and get a watch, a symbol of mechanical society in literature. He decides to “slough off my southern ways of speech,” rejecting his true blood and using Bledsoe as his model, as advised by Barbee.
Job hunting with his letters of recommendation on Wall Street he feels more strongly the deterministic force of money. “The streets were full of hurrying people who walked as though they had been wound up and were directed by some unseen control.” Regardless of race, everyone seems to be a puppet of the economy. Black couriers remind him of “prisoners carrying their leg irons as they escaped from a chain gang”—“maybe they were chained to money.” Waiting outside an office he sees through a window the Statue of Liberty with “her torch almost lost in the fog.” This image points ahead to his crossing the bridge in the fog and his experiences at the Liberty Paint factory. His failure to get any responses to his letters of introduction leaves him in a fog of uncertainty, desperate for a job. Ironically, in his greatest dependency, he gets a promising letter from Emerson. 9
The invisible man is not able to suppress his true blood when he hears a black man pushing a cart full of plans— blue -prints—singing the blues. “Why you trying to deny me?” the blues man challenges him. “Somehow he was like one of the vets from the Golden Day.” The blues and plans man sustains the bear motif that leads to hibernation in a basement den where the invisible man listens to blues and makes plans: “Man, this Harlem ain’t nothing but a bear’s den.” He tilts “his head to one side like a bear’s.” He is another of those “unrecognized compulsions of my being.”
At an importing firm he keeps his appointment to meet Emerson, who is not there. Instead he is met by a young white man who moves “with a long hip-swinging stride that caused me to frown.” On a table is a copy of Totem and Taboo. The young man is as swishy as the tropical birds fluttering in a cage. He is evasive, name drops Harvard and tells the narrator, “The only trouble with ambition is that it sometimes blinds one to realities.” His reality is connoted by his Club Calamus, a name from Walt Whitman’s poetry that is associated today with homosexuality. He wants to get naked. He suggests they “throw off the mask of custom and manners that insulate man from man, and converse in naked honesty and frankness… We’re both frustrated, understand? Both of us, and I want to help you…”
The narrator is invisible to the gay predator except as a sex object—an exotic like the caged birds. The naïve boy only wants to prove his identity and get a job. The gay man exclaims, “Identity! My God! Who has any identity any more anyway?” He seems to feel invisible himself, with an identity issue like the black man, but he is also trying to seduce the narrator into giving up his true identity. The upper-class Harvard grad compares himself absurdly with Huckleberry Finn, implying that Huck and Jim had a homosexual relationship, a notion fantasized by a few gay and Freudian critics. He makes his father Emerson equivalent to Pap Finn, a racist crook. The gay son hates his father, implicitly with good reason. In kindness, now seeing the narrator as a person, he shows him Bledsoe’s letter, which refers to the narrator’s “fall” and asks Emerson in effect to “keep this nigger boy running.”
Emerson is parallel to Bledsoe and his gay son is parallel to the invisible man in that he also has been disloyal: “my father would consider my revelation the most extreme treason… You’re free of him now. I’m still his prisoner.” He is like one of his father’s caged birds. Avoiding another cage himself, the invisible man declines his offer of a job without understanding what would be expected of him as the valet of a gay man. A valet is a virtual slave. Still naively blind, he is perplexed: “Everyone seemed to have some plan for me, and beneath that some more secret plan.” He is not yet his own plans man, he is like the Robin in the folksong that got his ass plucked instead of getting a worm. “What was young Emerson’s plan—and why should it have included me?” He feels like he is getting “hoped to death.” Only when he is self-reliant in accord with the original Emerson does he get an acceptable job.
though I had just begun to live.” He is reborn a machine just as Brockway said—“ we the machines .” One of his white attendants says “We’re trying to get you started again. Now shut up!” They are bleeding him like Bledsoe. The medical procedure is in the tradition of the mad scientist, as in Frankenstein (1813) by Mary Shelley and in “The Birthmark” (1843) and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) by Hawthorne. “I discovered now that my head was encircled by a piece of cold metal like the iron cap worn by the occupant of an electric chair.” The machine of society will execute his individuality and turn him into a robot, as in a Communist reeducation program or in Feminist sensitivity training. According to the discredited doctrine of cultural determinism, Nature is nothing, Nurture is everything. People are merely putty. This has been the theory of people who want to control other people—behavioral psychologists, Communists, Nazis, Socialists, and Feminists—since the early 20 th^ century.
On the contrary, scientific studies have proven that individual human traits are over 50% genetic and determined by Nature. Ellison satirizes both the myth that basic human nature can be changed and the displacement of faith in God by faith in the Machine—technology: “My little gadget will solve everything! …from now on do your praying to my little machine. I’ll deliver the cure.” Today liberals like these would have us reduced to little machines within the totalitarian machine of Big Government: “The machine will produce the results of a prefrontal lobotomy”—a complete “change of personality.”
The allegory is evident when it is said that the “case” of the invisible man—the patient—“has been developing some three hundred years.” He has been patient for a very long time. He is subjected to shocks that make him dance like a Sambo doll: “They really do have rhythm, don’t they? Get hot, boy! Get hot!” But he is like a disconnected boiler: “I wanted to be angry, murderously angry. But somehow the pulse of current smashing through my body prevented me. Something had been disconnected.”
Trapped in a glass box under a vast white ceiling, he is a drop of black dope lost in whiteness. He no longer knows his own name. Lobotomized and robotic, he mistakes the scream of a machine for his mother: “A machine my mother?… Clearly, I was out of my head.” But then “I fell to plotting ways of short-circuiting the machine.” He concludes that, “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.” The theme of rebirth is dramatized when the “head doctor” pulls “the cord which was attached to the stomach node, jerking me forward.” He is dressed in white overalls and told, “Well, boy, it looks as though you’re cured…. You’re a new man.”
He makes involuntary movements that are conditioned reflexes: “I don’t know why I did it.” He is freed from the hospital but fired from his job: “You just aren’t prepared for work under our industrial conditions. Later, perhaps, but not now.” The “new man” feels dissociated: “my mind and I were no longer getting around in the same circles. Nor my body either.” Now he feels “in the grip of some alien personality lodged deep within me.” As if possessed by a demon. He resists, “for knowing now that there was nothing which I could expect from them, there was no reason to be afraid…. And I felt that I would fall, had fallen, moved now as against a current sweeping swiftly against me.”
12
Now reborn, he has “wild, infant’s eyes” and is so weakened by his shocking experiences that he cannot stand on his own two feet. He is saved by the kindly Mary Rambo: “I’ll take care of you like I done a heap of others.” She does for others as she would have them do for her if she needed help—Christian morality. Her warm relations with fellow blacks in Harlem recalls the close interpersonal pastoral life in the Old South among blacks on some plantations so often cruelly disrupted by the slave trade.
The narrator goes along with Mary Rambo “inwardly rejecting and yet accepting her bossing…too tired to resist.” In her place, he feels like he is in “a hole,” yet he cannot deny that he is more comfortable with Mary than at the Men’s House. She gives him more than a place to lie down and good hot soup, she encourages him like his grandfather did: “You got to lead and you got to fight and move us all on up a little higher.” She denounces the likes of Bledsoe: “They finds a place for themselves and forgits the ones on the bottom.” Mary urges him, “Don’t get corrupted.”
Now a “disillusioned dreamer” he feels alienated among young men “still caught up in the illusions that had just been boomeranged out of my head.” He rebels when he sees a fat man from behind he thinks is Bledsoe and dumps a pail of sewage on his head—but he is mistaken—another boomerang. He is kicked out of the Men’s House just as was kicked out of college. So he rents a room from generous Mary Rambo who keeps his hope alive, though “I believed in nothing.” Thematic motifs from the paint factory are sustained, as he is “too much aboil inside…a spot of black anger glowed and threw off a hot red light.” Now he longs for internal harmony: “If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison.” 13
The style again becomes plain, concrete and evocative like the typical style of Hemingway, appealing to the senses for the taste and full meaning of the yams. The yam man is authentic like Jim Trueblood and yams represent the black southern heritage—what is most nutritious, filling, warm and sweet. These pastoral values sustain the heart in the mechanical Big City. Sweetness is a strong motif in black fiction. In Toni Morrison and in Alice Walker’s story “To Hell with Dying” for example, sweetness is essential to the survival of the soul. Eating the delicious hot sweet yam in brown syrup is sacramental here, because of all it means, as eating often is in Hemingway. Eating the yam fills the invisible man with “such a surge of homesickness that I turned away to keep my control.”
Eating a yam on a public street sets him free. He stops worrying about what people will think of him for eating a yam. Feeling free, he fantasizes humiliating Bledsoe—“I let out a wild laugh.” Eating the yam gives him a sense of identity that he expresses in a witty paraphrase of God from the Bible: “I yam what I am.” His wit is evidence of transcendence. The implication of his paraphrase is that his sense of identity derives from replacing the authority of the internalized white God with his own true blood, with the unblinded eye inside—the God of black spirituals as sung by the old woman in the Prologue. However, sweetness is not enough. “Continue on the yam level and life would be sweet—though somewhat yellowish.” To live the sweet life with Mary Rambo ignores the sour realities and is somewhat cowardly, hence the “unpleasant taste” in the end, frostbitten by cold awareness.
He comes upon a crowd watching an eviction. White prison “trustees” are carrying furniture out of a building and one says, “I don’t want to do this, I have to do it.” The old woman being evicted blames “all the white folks” and the narrator feels “as when a child, seeing the tears of his parents, is moved by both fear and sympathy to cry.” This dispossession becomes a metaphor of the black experience in general, particularized and brought to life by the detailed catalogue of personal objects and mementos, ending with life insurance policies stamped void, a newspaper photo of the real life black protest leader Marcus Garvey upon his deportation, and an old document freeing a slave.
“And it was as though I myself was being dispossessed… And beneath it all there boiled up all the shock-absorbing phrases that I had learned all my life. I seemed to teeter on the edge of a great dark hole.” When the crowd gets violent, he moves forward onto the front steps of the building and makes a speech urging restraint rather than riot. He tells the crowd they need a wise leader, having in mind the Founder of the college, earlier equated with Bledsoe. “’He was a handkerchief-headed rat!’ a woman screamed, her voice boiling with contempt.” The riot that follows is exploited by white members of the Communist Party, here called The Brotherhood. Chased across the rooftops by Brother Jack, the rabble-rouser arouses “a flight of frantic white birds, suddenly as large as buzzards as they beat furiously against my eyes.” He scares white pigeons on the roof, complacent whites above it all.
Brother Jack the Red has red hair and buys him coffee and cheesecake, praises his eloquence and tries to recruit him to the cause. Using stock political terms that dehumanize them he describes the evicted black couple as “agrarian types, you know. Being ground up by industrial conditions. Thrown on the dump heaps and cast aside.” Cast aside by him as well. Individuals are invisible to collectivists. “You mustn’t waste your emotions on individuals, they don’t count…. History has passed them by. Unfortunate, but there’s nothing to do about them.” This is the opposite of how the narrator feels, but Brother Jack insists that he is just being sentimental: “You have not completely shed that self, that old agrarian self, but it’s dead and you will throw it off completely and emerge something new.”
He is picked up in a taxi by Brother Jack and other Reds. One is smoking a pipe that is “a red disk in the dark” like the “angry sun” in an earlier scene. Waiting in a locker room to give his speech, the invisible man is implicitly compared to the photo of a boxer on the wall: “a popular fighter who had lost his sight in the ring. It must have been right here in this arena, I thought.” The boxer had been “beaten blind” in a crooked fight.” Now the invisible man tries “jabbing my suspicions away.” His feeling of inauthenticity leads to an Existentialist epiphany: “It was absurd.” Now he listens to the dissenting voice within himself: “my grandfather part; the cynical disbelieving part—the traitor self that always threatened internal discord.” In his new suit and with his new name “I was becoming someone else…. I was under orders. Even if I met Mary on the street, I’d have to pass her by unrecognized.”
Again he is betraying his true blood. Anticipating his own destination, he envisions from memory an ominous hole used for dumping. Now he sees Brother Jack as a toy bull terrier who resembles a black-and- white bulldog he knew named Master, chained to an apple tree. The term “Master” parallels Brother Jack to a slave overseer who is himself chained to an ideological order, tied to a presumption of knowledge. Coming on stage the invisible man is blinded by a spotlight, recalling the battle royal. The audience chants a slogan and Brother Jack presides “like a bemused father listening to the performance of his adoring children.” The invisible man is the last speaker: “The light was so strong that I could no longer see the audience… I felt the hard, mechanical isolation of the hospital machine and I didn’t like it.”
In his speech he picks up several other thematic motifs of the novel: “They think we’re blind…they’ve dispossessed us each of one eye from the day we’re born. So now we can only see in straight white lines.” He laments that blacks have been fighting amongst themselves: “Let’s reclaim our sight… Let’s get together… I feel that here, after a long and desperate and uncommonly blind journey, I have come home.” The crowd cheers and “Red spots danced before my eyes.” After his speech, “I stumbled as in a game of blindman’s bluff.” He gets pushed around verbally by criticisms from the Brothers, a reversal of his expectations. Brother Jack is pleased with the speech, but the pipe-smoking Red complains that he was politically incorrect. “He pronounced ‘incorrect’ as though the term described the most heinous crime imaginable.” Brother Westrum, explicitly compared to Supercargo, likewise condemns the speech as “unscientific.” This identifies the invisible man with the rioters in the Golden Day.
Defending him—“his red head bristling”—Brother Jack calls the audience a mob that is “boiling over to come along with us.” The argument is resolved by requiring the wildly emotional black man to be “tamed” by political indoctrination. Significantly, he must also “stay completely out of Harlem.” Once again white men are bleeding him of his true blood. At the same time, he is more than a black rabble-rouser, he has become “more human”: “The audience was mixed, their claims broader than race.” They are the poor, the dispossessed. “I would do whatever was necessary to serve them well.” This altruistic public service is his Existentialist “project” in a Postmodern age: “How else could I save myself from disintegration?” His personal integrity depends upon integration in society. In accord with the Existentialist emphasis on free will, he has transformed himself by force of will, for “I was someone new.”
He has transcended polarization, reconciling opposites in a step toward wholeness and transcendence: “Here was a way…not limited by black and white, but a way which…could lead to the highest possible rewards…. For the first time, lying there in the dark, I could glimpse the possibility of being more than a member of a race. It was no dream, the possibility existed. I had only to learn and survive in order to go to the top.” However, he is not yet fully enlightened. For he dismisses his grandfather as an irrelevant old slave, he is still being used by whites and he is blinded by the Brotherhood.
17
In the El Toro Bar, bullfight scenes on the wall behind the bar are metaphors: Like a matador Brother Jack with his red hair and Red ideology is controlling a wild black bull with a red cape “so close to his body that man and bull seemed to blend in one swirl of calm, pure motion.” By contrast in another scene “the matador was being swept skyward on the black bull’s horns.” Brother Jack has already been compared to a bull-dog and psychologically he is both matador and bull, in that like a matador he identifies with and
“becomes” the black bull—the invisible man—to anticipate its moves, control it and avoid getting tossed aside and perhaps killed. In a larger sense, the black bull is black Harlem. “’Master it,’ Brother Jack said.” Mastering the Red ideology means becoming a matador, a master to black people like a blind Barbee or a slave master. In the end the matador sacrifices the bull.
Mastering the people is the goal of all collectivists from liberals to Communists: “’Say what the people want to hear, but say it in such a way that they’ll do what we wish.’ He laughed. ‘Remember too, that theory always comes after practice. Act first, theorize later’.” This amounts to saying the end justifies the means, the rationale for fascism: Do anything , then justify it with rationalizations. This is why Brother Jack has no hesitation in using the invisible man to death if necessary. “He looked at me as though he did not see me.” The individual is merely a tool in the militant collective: “You’re a soldier now,” says Brother Jack, “your health belongs to the organization.”
The district offices of the Brotherhood, the Communist Party, are located in a “converted church,” the main floor of which was occupied by a pawn shop. Faith in the church has been displaced by faith in political action, due to continuing poverty as evinced by the pawn shop, where blacks are pawning their souls. The conflict in the black community is dramatized in the fight between the handsome young idealist Tod Clifton and the wild black nationalist and racist Ras the Exhorter who “has had a monopoly in Harlem.” Clifton punches Ras until he rocks “like a drunken bull… And as I came up Ras tried to bull his way out…” Ras is “bull-angry” and “butting him.” Ras lets Clifton live because he is black. He exhorts him to stop associating with whites and join a race war. He shakes his fist at a plane overhead like Bigger Thomas in Native Son (1940) by Wright. “Their money bleed black blood, mahn.” Comparing Clifton to an African king, Ras introduces a slogan that would become popular in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s: “You black and beautiful.”
The invisible man looks at a picture of the 19 th^ -century black leader Frederick Douglass on the wall of the Party office, “remembering and refusing to hear the echoes of my grandfather’s voice.” Ironically, as a community activist he is using his grandfather’s method of wearing a mask—but he is duping his own people: “I am what they think I am.” Now he models himself not on the mythic Founder but on Douglass as an escaped slave: “Douglass came north to escape and find work…[and] had taken another name…. I was dominated by the all-embracing idea of Brotherhood.”
18
The note of warning not to go too fast in his effort to help his people is a response to his “Rainbow” campaign promoting racial integration, an image still used today by some black leaders. The black Brother Tarp limps from “dragging a chain” on a chain gang and he reminds the narrator of his grandfather. He broke the chain by saying No to a man “who wanted to take something from me.” Tarp gives the invisible man a leg chain link—a link to his heritage—but the black Brother Wrestrum (rest room) is jealous of his success and objects: “Things that don’t make for Brotherhood have to be rooted out.”
The invisible man has accepted the conditioning he got subjected to in the factory hospital: “I’m a cog in a machine.” The Brotherhood is as much a machine as the factory. Becoming prominent for his successes, he is punished by reassignment to lecture “on the Woman Question.” He feels that “I had just been made the butt of an outrageous joke,” but “my main concern was to work my way ahead in the movement.” He interprets his new assignment as reflecting well on the Brotherhood, “proving that they drew no lines even when it came to women.” Even when? There are no women in the Brother -hood leadership and assigning a black man instead of a woman to lecture on the problems of women shows instead that the Brotherhood does not really give women a high priority. Women are invisible too. Forced to leave Harlem to lecture to white women downtown is removing the invisible man still further from his true blood.
19
After his first lecture a white woman approaches him “glowing” so warmly that he moves her over “near a partly uncoiled firehose.” At her luxurious apartment she slips into a “rich red” gown. He senses the “possibility of a heightened communication.” The vamp in red moves close and lusts after his ideology: “I
Like the funeral march for Martin Luther King, jr. over a decade later, the march for Tod Clifton transcends race: “Even white brothers and sisters were joining in.” Yet in his heart he blames all whites: “For they had the power to use a paper doll, first to destroy his integrity and then as an excuse for killing him.” Later in his funeral oration, however, he becomes objective: “He was full of illusions…. He was shot for a simple mistake of judgment… He lost his hold on reality.” The invisible man makes Tod in his coffin a symbol of blacks in a social box: “Our hope shot down.” The passionate intensity of that hope and its loss is conveyed in the agonized eulogy by the invisible man. In the end Tod goes “underground,” as the invisible man will be soon in his own hole. 22
Just as he angered management by mixing paint incorrectly because they gave him no guidance, now the invisible man has angered the Brotherhood by mixing races and speaking incorrectly because they excluded him from a strategy meeting and gave him no guidance. The Brotherhood berates and ridicules him and calls Tod Clifton a racist traitor. He defends Tod: “He was shot because he was black and because he resisted. Mainly because he was black…. If he’d been white, he’d be alive. Or if he’d accepted being pushed around.” Brother Jack says “You were not hired to think.” The invisible man begins returning their sarcasm: “Things have been so brotherly I had forgotten my place.” For presuming to speak from the heart in his eulogy Brother Tobitt (two bits) accuses him of thinking he is “The black God.”
Brother Jack says the organization does not give “undue importance to the mistaken notions of the people… Our job is not to ask them what they think but to tell them.” That is, Communists are dictators who do not tolerate democracy or individual rights. The invisible man tells them blacks are saying that the Brotherhood betrayed them…and that is why Brother Clifton disappeared. He accuses Brother Jack of acting like “the great white father”—like Norton, or like a slave plantation owner, or like a white President to dispossessed Indians. “Wouldn’t it be better if they called you Marse Jack?”
Infuriated at being compared to a slave master Jack turns redder, lapses “into a foreign language”— probably Russian—and his glass eye pops out of its socket. The leftist is blind in his “left eye.” In contrast, the invisible man feels that “I was just awakening from a dream. I had boomeranged around.” But if he leaves the Brotherhood, “I’d be nowhere… Some of me, too, had died with Tod Clifton.”
23
Now that hope is dead, the cynical Ras the black nationalist is rising in influence, calling for race war. Opposing him, the invisible man speaks to the crowd advocating racial integration--the “melting pot”--and true brotherhood: “We are Americans, all of us, whether black or white.” His black and white shoes and later his dark glasses and white hat reconcile opposites. The white hat also connotes a mock hero. The polarized Ras calls him a “paid stooge of the white enslaver!” He is beaten by followers of Ras and escapes by disguising himself with a pair of dark glasses tinted green: “I could barely see.” The strong thematic motif of blindness in the novel discredits these glasses from the outset, but they do prove useful and the green tint suggests that they help him to grow, to become visible to himself.
He is mistaken for somebody named Rinehart by a woman who calls him “Rine.” The name suggests a mask—a fake personna concealing the heart. She also calls him “baby,” as if he has been reborn again. The dark glasses turn his vision “sinister” and he adds a wide hat to his hipster disguise: “In the angry period to come I would be able to move about.” He is so changed that he is not recognized by Brother Maceo and gets into a fight with him—“it was absurd.” Now he is fighting the Brotherhood. The feeling of absurdity is a signature of Existentialism. As Rinehart the invisible man seems to be the ultimate Existentialist protagonist, creating not just one but a number of different identities, but none of them are authentic: “Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rine the Reverend.” To be the real Rinehart he would “have to have a heartless heart and be ready to do anything…. Could he himself be both rind and heart?”
Seeing on the church wall the words “LET THERE BE LIGHT!” he takes off his dark glasses and white hat. This paragraph is informed by the original Emerson in Nature (1836), especially by its last paragraph defining reality as fluid and its concluding sentence “Build therefore your own world.” The invisible man says “The world in which we lived was without boundaries. A vast seething, hot world of fluidity…” In the 20 th^ century this Emersonian tradition got stripped of its Transcendentalism and became Existentialism: “His world was possibility and he knew it…. You could actually make yourself anew…. All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility.”
He sees himself as having been naïve before—“crazy and blind.” Rinehart teaches him that he is free to create his own identity, a complete reversal of the deterministic Naturalism that has governed the novel up to this point. However, he is still limited by his political vision as symbolized by the false eye of Brother Jack: “Perhaps, I thought, the whole thing should roll off me like drops of water rolling off Jack’s glass eye. I should search out the proper political classification, label Rinehart and his situation and quickly forget it. I hurried away from the church.” Still thinking in reductive political terms, he returns to the Brotherhood office and then goes on to Hambro for more indoctrination. His replacement of faith in the church with faith in politics is Postmodernist, as is his urbanism, seeing the big city as the place “You could actually make yourself anew.”
Rinehart has further subverted his faith in the Brotherhood. Now he criticizes his indoctrinator Hambro for being too reductive and “narrowly logical. He’d see Rinehart simply as a criminal, my obsession as a fall into pure mysticism.” The intellectual level of Hambro’s Communist indoctrination is implicitly compared to the nursery songs being sung in the apartment by his small children. Hambro tells the black narrator that black people “will have to be sacrificed.” He says “The trick is to take advantage of them in their own best interest.” His indoctrinator Hambro turns out to be another Bledsoe, and another Rinehart—a cynical charlatan. The invisible man feels himself back in the hospital machine again getting another shock treatment. “Everywhere I’ve turned somebody has wanted to sacrifice me for my own good—only they were the ones who benefited.”
Feeling invisible to all, “I’d have to do a Rinehart.” His fragmentary experiences begin to coalesce: “It was a joke, an absurd joke. And now I looked around a corner of my mind and saw Jack and Norton and Emerson merge into one single white figure.” He decides to live by the advice of his grandfather to “overcome them with yeses, undermine them with grins, I’d agree them to death and destruction. Yes, and I’d let them swoller me [the whale motif] until they vomited or burst wide open.” He decides to use Rinehart methods to destroy the Brotherhood in Harlem and plans to begin by seducing Emma—Jack’s mistress--at the party to follow a meeting the next day at the Chthonian hotel.
24
While Ras is provoking violence “actually being directed against the community itself,” the invisible man begins duping the Brotherhood: “I was to be a justifier, my task would be to deny the unpredictable human element of all Harlem so that they could ignore it when it in any way interfered with their plans…if other minorities loved the country despite their grievances, I would assure the committee that we, immune to such absurdly human and mixed reactions, hated it absolutely.” By now he has learned that Communists and liberals—blind in the left eye like Brother Jack--believe their own propaganda.
The invisible man decides that Emma is too loyal to Jack to seduce into becoming his informant. Acting as a Rinehart, he instead seduces Sybil, the lonely wife of another Brotherhood leader. She is named after the legendary psychic informant in ancient Greece--“a leathery old girl.” The name becomes increasingly ironic as she displays her stupidity. She proves to be completely ignorant of politics, for a start, hence of no use to the invisible man, who feels increasingly guilty as a Rinehart. Sybil sees him only as “Brother Taboo with-whom-all-things-are-possible.” Her husband “talks a lot about women’s rights, but what does he know about what a woman needs?” By now a slurring horny drunk, she calls her husband “blind ‘sa mole in a hole.” She begs the exotic black brother to rape her—“Threaten to kill me if I don’t give in…. I think I’m a nymphomaniac.” She calls him “boo’ful,” a conflation of beautiful and scary— boo! Scary in a childish way. “Was she calling me beautiful or boogieful?”
