Quarter 1; Post 4

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is going down as my favorite book on a couple of my college applications. I believe it too; it isn’t just too woo them with my ability to read 500 pages. This is one of the first books I have read as a close reader and truly enjoyed. The payoff of engaging with the text is real. Invisible Man was an art piece worth remembering and I’ll try to articulate my thoughts on it. My framework for doing so will be discussing the narrator’s grandfather, colors and lighting in the novel and blindness.

As discussed in my first blog post, from his deathbed, the narrator’s grandfather orates what would become a curse in the narrator’s life. The grandfather tells his family that “after I’m gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. 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” (16). In my first blog post I hypothesized that the grandfather’s curse would serve a symbolic role because Ellison ends the chapter with the narrator’s grandfather profiting off of the narrator’s dreamed failure. Indeed, the curse comes back to push the narrator in the opposite direction of his ambitions. When the narrator finishes his first speech in Harlem with the brotherhood, Ellison writes, “Perhaps the part of me that observed listlessly but saw all, missing nothing, was still the malicious, arguing part; the dissenting voice, my grandfather part; the cynical, disbelieving part -- the traitor self that always threatened internal discord” (335). A more concrete example of the curse occurs after the narrator gets a letter from the South, unstamped and undated telling him to slow down his work. He looks up, and exclaims, “I received another shock. Framed and there in the gray, early morning light of the door, my grandfather seemed to look from his eyes. I gave a quick gasp, then there was a silence in which I could hear his wheezing breath as he eyed me unperturbed” (384). The fact that the letter has no sender and the narrator looks up and sees, mysteriously, a “painting” of his grandfather that wasn’t there before suggests that the letter is figuratively from his grandfather. His grandfather represents black distrust in white folks. His grandfather would side with Ras the Exhorter given the choice, a black nationalist. The ghostly appearance of the grandfather slows the narrator’s progress on racial issues and helps Ellison convey his message that to further separate the oppressors from the oppressed is not the answer.

Colors and lighting in Invisible Man are blatantly repetitive and used in nearly every description, so Perrine and my instinct say that they have symbolic significance and lead to meaning. Namely, there is the contrast between black and white. For instance after the narrator is running from the cops pursuing him for his eviction protest speech he sees a myriad of white: “The long white stretch of street was empty, the aroused pigeons still circling overhead. I scanned the roofs, expecting to see him peering down. The wound of shouting continued to rise, then another green and white patrol car was whining around the corner and speeding past me” (286). Here Ellison associates white with panic and the bigoted police force. Later in his journey with the Brotherhood, the narrator is given a “white envelope” and jack says “This is your new identity…open it” (309). Whiteness means needing to cover up who he is and go by a different name and fulfill a different role in society. Whiteness means fakeness. During Clifton’s death white pigeons shed their feathers indicating an injustice. The contrast is subtle, but certain between black and white. Black means trustworthiness and unity to the narrator. The practiced reader knows white most often means innocence, and purity whereas black represents hell or the dark and dreary parts of life. Ellison takes this idea and shoves it back in our faces as readers but reversed. It is not an ironic move, but rather one that makes the reader consider why we are alarmed when something white turns out to be destructive, and have trouble finding the beauty he discusses in black.

The lighting of situations complements the white and black opposites. For instance Ellison will almost always elect to include descriptive language of whether a room is dim, dark, bright or anywhere in between. When taking notes of page numbers for recurring motifs I listed over 20 for descriptions of light. I believe this is to show that despite lighting, the narrator was still invisible. This plays well into the last point about blindness. Thomas C. Foster wrote a chapter about blindness in How To Read Literature Like A Professor and I was confused because I hadn’t read many books with prevalent blindness. Invisible Man fixed that problem. Blindness is directly mentioned tens of times, and implicitly referenced when someone can not see. From when narrator is “blinded” by the light on stage to when Barbee gets up to make his speech about the Founder’s importance blind every character has the ability to be blind. The most important reference to blindness is when Jack is reiterating the Brotherhood’s ideology to the narrator. The observed lack of an eye for Jack occurs during this explanation of the ideology indicating a major flaw. Not to mention that while studying books written by white men on how to achieve social justice, a flagrant social injustice has just been committed unto brother Clifton and no one is doing anything. Intuitively we don’t want to get ourselves into anything “blindly,” it’s a figure of speech. But the idea is that what we say and do is conscious. The narrator becomes fully cognizant through others’s blindness that he is being played as a puppet. At one point he was showing Mr. Norton what Dr. Bledsoe wanted Mr. Norton to see, and now he is preaching to the American populace what the brotherhood wants to see them hear.

In the narrator’s first speech, before brotherhood literature has corrupted him, he says “Did you ever notice my dumb one-eyed brothers, how two totally blind men can get together and help one another along? They stumble, they bump into things, but they avoid dangers too; they get along. Let’s get together, uncommon people. With both our eyes we may see what makes us so uncommon” (344). This is truth; and this speech is interactive and one of the narrator’s personal favorites even though it receives heavy critiquing from the blind brothers themselves.

Race is ultimately something we see. Ellison tests our ability to dive into his fictional work and inspect race at this most basic level. Do we see anything? If so, what do we assosiate that sight with? What do we do about what we see? Is it better to see in no light, dim light, white or black? Ellison’s novel has real world implications today, and is beautifully written. I suggest it.