The significance that the grandfather’s deathbed speech had on the narrator is unclear. The narrator himself seems confused by the speech and tries to ignore it for most of his life, but once he starts seeing the world and the people in it as they truly are, he uses the speech to give his own life new meaning. I think that the grandfather believed he had betrayed his people by always wanting to please people. In becoming amiable, the narrator loses himself, but he later figures out what he believes in and, using the strategy of smiling betrayal, decides to go along with the brotherhood’s plans, while also trying to undermine them. He pretended to want one thing while working for another thing, which quite possibly contributed to maintaining his invisibility.
Oratory, or skill in public speaking, is used to inspire and motivate people. It gives the audience a common understanding and spurs them into action. The narrator uses his education, which he sometimes deems worthless, to reach out to both races and try to bring them together for a common purpose. In using his educated mannerisms, he sometimes feels disconnected from his people but knows that his speeches are the best way to be heard. Speakers have to be specific in their use of language because if they aren’t careful their speeches can be turned into a means of destruction and violence like that of the narrator’s speech on dispossession, which led to a fight with people from the government and his speech at Clifton’s funeral leading the masses to riot.
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The entire novel is based on a fight between blacks and whites. Their basis is racial injustices and the idea of white superiority. The races are engaged in a battle of both physical and psychological warfare. The whole concept of invisibility stems from the segregation of blacks and whites, in which both races lived entirely separate lives and gave rise to feelings of oppression and degradation, which created constant conflict between the two races.
I believe that there is little possibility of friendship or cooperation between the races when based solely upon the narrator’s relationships with these white benefactors. Every white man he encountered was using him for their gain or saw him as less than a person. Brother Jack used him for his political standing and further his reputation among the people for multiple causes. The white men he passed on the streets and those that he worked with in the paint factory didn’t treat him as an equal and seemingly regarded him with contempt. This isn’t based on all whites, but the majority of them were only concerned with themselves and what he could do for them. In today’s day and age, integration between races has proved that cooperation and friendship can exist.
Brother Clifton was the first of the three to strike out against social norms, Brother Tarp was a slave and gave a link of the chain to the narrator, and the narrator was kicked out of school, but they all ended up with the brotherhood. In many ways, Brother Clifton and Tarp prove to be better friends and more trustworthy people than the white “benefactors” because the discrimination of black people is different in the eyes of a white person.
The way Ellison’s language manages to make the Brotherhood’s thoughts and actions seem as though they are coming from a higher power resembles that of the nation’s government. Like that of the brotherhood, no one knows what happens in the government, we only know what they have allowed to make public. I believe Ellison is attempting to state that people as a whole should be more cautious and learn all of the facts of a situation before jumping into something. The narrator utilizes the Founder, the Brotherhood, Ras the Exhorter, and others to represent the powerful social forces that worked with or in opposition to African Americans. Ellison conveys the failures of these people through the narrator. For example, Ras the Exhorter was against the Brotherhood and his way of undermining them was foolish to the narrator. The narrator is also used in the shortcomings of the Brotherhood because when he found out that the group wasn’t what he thought it was, he felt that they had failed him and that he had failed himself.
Tod Clifton might have left the Brotherhood because he found that he no longer agreed with their tactics or tendencies. Clifton didn’t approve of what the Brotherhood was doing, so the demeaning Sambo dolls, which represented an insult to African Americans, were meant to show the public that not everything you see turns out to be what you expect
. I think that what the narrator means by Clifton falling out of history is that he thought the Brotherhood would make extraordinary changes and do meaningful things that would affect society, but Clifton would no longer be a part of it. I think that by focusing on the “invisible man” and not narrowing it down to one specific race, Ellison shows that he believes that everyone deserves second chances and has the potential to do great things.
Ellison establishes an atmosphere of paranoia in his novel because the narrator is afraid of becoming invisible, but at the same time wishes to go unnoticed by certain groups of people. In various instances, the narrator becomes anxious at the thought of someone from his past recognizing him or someone from his present noticing him. This style of writing is particularly appropriate to Ellison’s subject matter because at this time, living in fear wasn’t uncommon. This is because people of color never knew what was going to happen to them or how people would react to their presence.
These various scenes in the novel are all similar to songs in the ways that they are very descriptive and recount individual encounters. The description of the college campus is more laidback and centered around the characteristics of the world, while the chapel scene carries with it a sense of vulnerability and anxiousness. Ellison used his musical background to keep the intensity of the current story and used “music” in the scenes to heighten their significance as a result of their differences. Every scene is unique, which brings about their melodic qualities.
This book is still alive because racism isn't dead. If African Americans weren't still dealing with racism in our general public, this novel would just be utilized as a historical work. In any case, when you remove the Invisible Man from the setting of mere racism, more individuals would have the ability to identify with these accounts. The novel speaks to African American experiences and sheds light on the various social and racial injustices. The author wrote this book in a way that kept the reader guessing and engaged, while also allowing them to learn and see how people can relate to the scenes in a variety of ways and situations. I do not know how true this novel was to the lives of black Americans because I have no personal experience with these situations, however, I do believe that what was written is most likely very accurate.
I believe that Ellison wrote this novel with the idea of reaching a broader audience, one in which a white reader could read it without becoming defensive and could feel empathetic towards the struggles of a black man in white America. I think Ellison tried to make the language of the narrator seem “whiter” because he did seem to stick out in encounters with other black people. Given that the author was writing a book on what wasn’t working for blacks in America, one of those challenges being whites, I think he did an excellent job of effectively getting his message across. I feel like the novel’s meaning was rather universal and not meant to cater to one specific race of people, but rather to point out what was going wrong in society.
Identity is the contention between self-perception and the projection of others
Rising above conflicts of race and the various ways mankind has categorized people
Exposition: The novel begins with a nameless man, who feels as though he is not a part of anything meaningful or doesn’t belong because he is invisible by society’s standards. He recounts the lessons learned in his school days to clue the reader into how he became the way he is. He notes that after undergoing humiliating and gruesome acts at the hands of white people, he was able to deliver a speech, but it left him feeling even more miserable and invisible.
Rising Action: The narrator gets expelled from college based on something he had no control over and strikes out on his own to find work in New York. Once there, he finds himself in the basement of Liberty Paints Plant and gets caught in the explosion of the boiler room. He wakes up with little memory and leaves the factory, feeling disconnected from his mind and himself.
Climax: The climax of the novel comes when the narrator witnesses Tod Clifton’s racially motivated murder at the hands of white police officers. Much to the dismay of the Brotherhood, the narrator takes it upon himself to make the funeral arrangements and gets many people to show up and share in his pain. The Brotherhood berates him for this act of independence and he finally sees what the Brotherhood is actually about.
Falling Action: The falling action of the novel is when the riots break out in the streets of Harlem. The riots were a way of releasing the repressed animosity that had accumulated from Clifton’s funeral. The narrator encounters Ras the Exhorter, who orders the capture and hanging of the invisible man. Now on the run from Ras and the police, the narrator descends into a manhole and continues to live below the surface of society.
Resolution: While underground, the narrator grows from his knowledge and develops insight that is both significant and liberating. He decides to record his thoughts and lessons and realizes that it’s time for him to emerge from the underground and rejoin the world. He is now able to recognize that his identity comes from within and outside of himself and that he needs to find a balance between the two. He continues to call himself an invisible man but has found a more empowering method of seeing and dealing with his intangibility, one that will permit him to act and survive in a racist society. The novel begins in a small town located in the American South during the 1930s, then moves to a nearby Negro College. After the narrator’s untimely expulsion from college, he moves to New York City’s Harlem, where he finds work and lives, first in a boarding room, then in his apartment. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator lives underground in a sewage vent. The first and final chapters occur in the present and frame the past occurrences that make up the body of the novel.
One significant minor character is Mary, a motherly woman, who rents a room out to the narrator when he is at his lowest. She encouraged him to use his voice and didn’t force her own opinions onto him. She didn’t use him for her gain and treated him like a friend.
Brother Tod Clifton was also a significant minor character. He was a young black youth leader of the Brotherhood, who was fighting for racial equality in a white society. The narrator and Brother Clifton share similar ideals, and the narrator is disappointed when Clifton leaves the Brotherhood but later understands why he did it. Brother Clifton left the Brotherhood because he and his cause were being overlooked and he decided that he wanted to spread awareness of the fact that what you expect isn’t always what you get.
Another significant minor character was Ras the Exhorter. He was an impassioned and enraged man who had a flair for public agitation. He regularly opposes the Brotherhood and the narrator himself, generally violently, and provokes riots in the streets of Harlem. Ras is representative of the black nationalist movement and believes that blacks and whites never come together, as well as advocates for the violent overture of white supremacy.
Mr. Norton can be seen as a significant minor character because he is one of the wealthy white trustees at the narrator’s college. He tells the narrator that he is Mr. Norton’s destiny, which tricks the narrator into feeling important when in reality he’s just being used to make Mr. Norton feel good about himself. Mr. Norton doesn’t care what the students do as long as he feels he is helping them, and he relies on the future fortune for his agenda, which is making himself feel and look useful and important.
Rinehart is another significant minor character. He is a figure who never appears in the novel in person, but only in reputation. The narrator realizes that Rinehart’s possession of multiple identities represents a life of opportunity, intricacy, and possibility, which the narrator finds intriguing and thus follows suit to go unrecognized. Rinehart’s shape-shifting capacity represents the problem of identity and the projection of others.
Blindness represents the flawed perception people hold and how they deliberately evade noticing and confronting the truth. The narrator repeatedly notes that people’s failure to see what their bias doesn’t permit them to see has constrained him to an existence of effective invisibility. Unfortunately, prejudice of others isn’t the only form of blindness referenced in the novel. Many people also refuse to accept truths about themselves or their society, and this refusal rises consistently in the symbolism of visual deficiency. In this manner, the young boys who were a part of the “battle royal” wore blindfolds, representing their powerlessness to perceive their abuse, and were at the mercy of the white men. The Founder’s statue, which is void of eyes, at the college, implies his ideology’s obstinate disregard of racist realities. Reverend Homer A. Barbee, who romanticizes the Founder, and Brother Jack, who lacks an eye, but has replaced it with a glass one, are both afflicted with this blindness, as well as the narrator himself. When under enormous, blinding lights, addressing the black community, he is unable to see the faces of whom he is speaking. For each situation, the lack of sight compares to an absence of knowledge.
Throughout the novel, the paper isn’t a good sign for the narrator. His first encounter with paper as a bad omen came in the form of Dr. Bledsoe’s “recommendation” letters. The reality behind these letters was one of rejection, which left the narrator hurt, embarrassed, and confused. The second occurrence was when he agreed to join the Brotherhood. He received two pieces of paper that night: one contained his new identity and the other money. The Brotherhood robbed the narrator of his identity and replaced it with a version of someone they hoped would advance their standing in society. Normally, money could be seen as a good thing, but this money came from the Brotherhood and at the expense of losing himself, so others could prosper. Finally, the narrator receives a letter, in which he is told to slow down on his approach to the people and in his movements. After receiving this letter, he is accused of being an opportunist and is sent away, at which time the Brotherhood allows his movements to fall apart and starts to show their true intentions.
The Sambo doll represents degrading black stereotypes and illustrates the power one has to control a person’s movement. The Sambo doll is representative of the Sambo slave, who, in white stereotypes, was considered lazy, but obedient. The dancing doll also symbolizes the demeaning stereotype of the black entertainer for the white people. Tod Clifton and the narrator were the Sambo dolls of the Brotherhood. They were being yanked around by strings they couldn’t see and manipulated by forces stronger than themselves. The narrator’s name, appearance, oratory skills, and ideology were all changed by the Brotherhood in assistance to their organization’s advancements.
At Liberty Paints Plant, how the optic white paint is made is representative of how the American working society needs the assistance of the black working class. The white owners sell the paint and earn more money than the black workers do, even though the black workers carry out all of the essential labor. To make the “purest white that can be found” (Ellison 202), ten drops of black toner must be added and mixed into the white paint. This process demonstrates the idea of white dominance over black workers. In addition, Liberty Paints Plant insists that the optic white paint can cover any blemish or stain. This is similar to that of whites being willing to cover up the black culture and identity with their white standards and community.
Brother Tarp’s leg chain symbolizes the suffering and injustices of the treatment he had to endure for simply saying no to a man who wanted to take something from him. The chain link is somewhat related to his grandfather’s speech in the way that it highlights the injustices in the treatment of blacks. The link that Brother Tarp gave to the narrator becomes a symbol of his liberation from the oppression, constraints, and afflictions of the Brotherhood.
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