Quarter 1; Post 3

Ralph Ellison’s unnamed protagonist and narrator’s epic quest from his Southern black college to Harlem New York is not a smooth one. If it were a smooth one though, Invisible Man wouldn’t be the art piece that it is. I am nearly done with the book -- page 528 of 580 -- and man events are adding up to create a climactic time in the narrator’s quest.

As the narrator begins to get fed up with the Mens House, and as his job opportunities fall through due to Bledsoe’s malicious letters, a woman named Mary encounters the narrator as he is leaving the hospital after his paint factory incident. She extends a helping hand to him and takes him in for the night. This part of the text reminded me of when Robbie turner is at war fighting and citizens take him in to eat. I take two things out of the initial run in with mary: that our unnamed narrator is a Christ figure to some extent and Mary has to function as the virgin Mary if the first condition is true. As the narrator is running out of Mary’s distraught, Ellison writes, “And behind the film of frost etching the glass I saw two brashly painted plaster images of Mary and Jesus surrounded by dream books, love powders, God-Is-Love signs, money-drawing oil and plastic dice” (262). The narrator going on to see a sign that reads “you too can be truly beautiful” with “ointments guaranteed to produce the miracle of whitening black skin” validates the importance of the Mary and Jesus image because he is having things that are important and relevant to his purpose flash before his eyes. Similar to Tim O’Brien’s figurative baptism on the water with Elroy in The Things They Carried, our narrator in Invisible Man is going through a contemplative period. Ellison furthers the allusion to Jesus and Mary by making the narrator conscious of the fact during his baptism. There is water present during this period in the text as well: “And while the ice was melting to form a flood in which I threatened to drown I awoke one afternoon to find that my first northern winter had set” (260). winter-like period of rest and hibernation will allow for the narrator to find a new guiding purpose or drive. Or maybe not entirely new, but a variation and advancement of his old one bestowed upon him by Dr. Bledsoe.

On to a new idea. I’ll come back to that one in the fourth blog post. In a text with an unnamed protagonist, when characters are named it is significant. Ellison defying our normal idea of everyone having a name that they go buy allows him to play with the idea of naming later in the text firstly when the narrator is given a new name to “preach” under for the Brotherhood and secondly when he is called Rinehart for various reasons. Besides the name Mary representing the virgin Mary and strengthening the tie of the narrator to Jesus, Bledsoe ends up being fierce and bloody, and Sybil, the mistress of a significant brother ends up romantically (weirdly, too) involved with the narrator. Originally attempting to discover the true motives behind the Brotherhood to which he is employed, he takes advantage of Sybil, who eventually coerces him to engage in her sick sexual fantasy. Ellison writes, “I was annoyed enough to slap her. She lay aggressively receptive, flushed, her navel no goblet but a pit in an earthquaking land, flexing taut and expansive. Then she said, ‘Come on come on!’ and I said, ‘Sure, sure,’ looking around wildly and starting to pour the drink upon her” (522). Sybil turns out to have no useful information and only desires the narrator sexually. The narrator ends up in a position where he is protecting himself, and coming to terms with the fact that he is invisible. Sybil in Greek Mythology is a woman who guides a significant man through the underworld. I take this to mean that invisibility is the inevitable hell for the narrator. No matter what he does, who he sees, or how is gets his message across he is painfully invisible which thwarts his dreams.