The Narrator Essay, Research Paper
The narrator’s grandparents were freed slaves who believed they were
separate but equal after the Civil War. His grandfather lived a meek and quiet
life after being freed. However, on his deathbed, he tells the narrator’s father
that the lives of black Americans are a ‘war’ and that he himself feels like a
traitor. He counsels the narrator’s father to undermine the whites with ‘yeses’
and ‘grins.’ He advises his family to ‘agree ‘em to death and destruction.’ His
grandfather’s dying words haunt the narrator. He lives meekly, like his
grandfather. Like him, the narrator receives praise from the white members of
his town, but feels troubled that his grandfather branded such meekness as
treachery.
On his graduation day, he delivers a speech preaching humility and
submission as the key to the advancement of black Americans. The speech is
such a success that the town arranges to have him deliver it at a gathering of
the community’s leading white citizens. He arrives and is told to take part in
the ‘battle royal’ that figures as part of the evening’s entertainment. The
narrator and some of his classmates don boxing gloves and enter the ring. A
naked, blond, white woman with an American flag painted on her stomach
parades about as the white men demand that they look at her.
Afterwards, the white men blindfold the youths and order them to
viciously pummel one another. The narrator is defeated in the last round. After
they remove the blindfolds, the contestants are led to a rug covered with coins
and a few crumpled bills. They lunge for the money, only to discover that the
rug is electrified. The white men attempt to force the victims to fall face
forward onto the rug during the mad scramble.
While the narrator gives his speech, they all laugh and ignore him as he
quotes verbatim large sections of Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Exposition
Address.” In the midst of the amused, drunken requests that he repeat the
phrase ’social responsibility,’ the narrator accidentally says ’social equality.’
The white men angrily demand that he explain himself. He states that he made
a mistake. He finishes to uproarious applause. They award him a calfskin
briefcase. He is told to cherish it as a ‘badge of office’ because one day ‘it will
be filled with important papers that will shape the destiny’ of his people. He is
overjoyed to find a scholarship to the state college for black youth inside. He
does not even care when later he discovers that the gold coins from the
electrified rug are worthless brass tokens.
That night he has a dream of going to a circus with his grandfather who
refuses to laugh at the clowns. He instructs the narrator to open the briefcase.
Inside, the narrator finds an official envelope with a state seal. He opens it
only to find another envelope that contains another envelope. The last one
contains an engraved document reading: “To Whom It May Concern, Keep
This Nigger-Boy Running.” The narrator awakes with his grandfather’s
laughter ringing in his ears.
Analysis
The narrator’s grandfather intensifies the theme of ambiguity. He
confesses that he feels as though his meekness in the face of the South’s
enduring racist structure makes him a traitor. It is unclear whom he feels he
has betrayed: himself, his family, or his race. All his life, he had espoused faith
in the Jim Crow structure of equality with segregation, but on his deathbed he
rejects this faith. He advises his family to have two identities as a form of
self-protection. On the outside they should embody the stereotypical ‘good
slaves,’ behaving just as their former white masters wish, but they should
never fully believe in this identity. On the inside, they should retain their
bitterness and resentment against the imposed false identity. By following the
grandfather’s model, they can refuse to accept second-class status internally,
protect their own self-respect, and avoid betraying themselves.
The theme of subterfuge through masks will become increasingly
important later in the novel. A mask becomes a form of defense against the
aggressive and hostile onslaughts of others against the individual’s
self-concept. The grandfather’s advice can also indicate a form of resistance.
He tells his family to play the role of the ‘good slaves’ so well that it almost
becomes a parody. Excessive obedience to Southern whites’ expectations can
become disobedience. The grandfather wants his family to exploit to their
advantage the rift between how others perceive them and how they perceive
themselves.
The narrator believes that blind obedience will win him respect and
praise. The white men offer him success on one hand for obedience, but on
the other hand they use obedience to degrade him with the barbaric battle
royal. The boys are expected to accept blindness by wearing the blindfolds in
return for the dubious reward of false coins on an electrified rug. The white
men wear false masks of goodwill that barely conceal their real, racist
motives. They remain blind to their own brutish, drunken behavior by forcing
the boys to conform to the racial stereotype of the black man as a violent,
savage, over-sexed beast. The narrator has not yet learned to see behind the
surfaces of things. He believes that surface appearances are true only to
discover later that his ’sight’ failed him. The coins are false and the
innocuous-looking rug is electrified.
The narrator’s speech contains long quotations from Booker T.
Washington’s “Atlanta Exposition Address,” but he doesn’t actually name
Washington directly. Washington’s program for the advancement of black
Americans emphasized industrial education. He believed blacks should avoid
clamoring for political and civil rights and instead should put their energy
toward achieving economic success. The narrator’s grandfather lived by that
ideology only to recognize that it contained major limitations. Washington
hoped for racial equality through the assumption of the role of ‘the model
black citizen:’ “Work hard, but don’t draw attention to yourself by demanding
political and civil rights.” His philosophy could only go so far. The successful
black businessman was as vulnerable to racial prejudice as the poor,
uneducated sharecropper. He mistakenly believed economic success would
lead to freedom.
The narrator slips and says ’social equality’ while delivering his address.
Whereas the white men conceded some ‘benevolence’ to the narrator when
he embodied the ‘model black citizen,’ they show their true faces when he
slips. This turn reveals the limitations of Washington’s philosophy. The
narrator’s blind obedience to the ‘good slave’ role does not ‘free’ him from
racism. The moment he exhibits something like an individual opinion, the white
men demand that he return to the ‘good slave’ role. Retracting the verbal slip,
he does so, and they reward him with the briefcase and the scholarship. They
allow him to pursue social advancement, but only on their terms. They want
him to speak in such a way that affirms their belief in their natural superiority.
He is told to consider the briefcase a ‘badge of office.’ Ironically this ‘office’ is
that of the ‘good slave’ that they have forced him to play. The briefcase will
appear several times throughout the novel as a reminder of the bitter irony of
this speech.
The narrator has yet to tell the difference between espousing an
ideology and playing a role. His dream hints at his vague awareness of the real
meaning behind the incident. The scholarship is a gift with ambiguous
significance. On the surface it appears to symbolize the white men’s
benevolent generosity, but underneath it symbolizes their control over his
identity.
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Invisible Man – Chapters 2-3
Summary
The narrator is fascinated by his recollection of the bronze statue of the
college Founder. He describes the statue as a ‘cold Father symbol’ with
‘empty eyes.’ At the end of his junior year, the narrator is assigned the task of
driving around Mr. Norton, one of the college’s white millionaire founders. He
innocently drives Norton beyond the campus to an area of ramshackle cabins
nearby. The cabins are left over slave quarters now inhabited by poor black
sharecroppers. Norton is intrigued by them, and the narrator immediately
regrets having driven him to this area since Jim Trueblood lives in one of them.
The college regards Trueblood with hatred and distrust because he has
committed incest with his now-pregnant daughter. Norton reacts with horror
when the narrator reveals this information, but he insists on speaking with
Trueblood.
Trueblood explains that he committed incest because he had a strange
dream, and he woke up while having sex with his daughter. Norton listens
with a morbid, voyeuristic fascination. Trueblood expresses wonder at the
fact that white people have showered him with more money and help than
ever before after he has broken the unspeakable taboo of incest. Norton,
shocked at the story, hands Trueblood a hundred dollar bill to buy toys for his
children. He gets back into the car in a daze and requests some whiskey to
calm his nerves.
The narrator, fearing that Norton might die from shock, drives to the
nearest tavern, the Golden Day, which also happens to be a brothel. When he
arrives, a group of mentally-disturbed war veterans are on leave for the
afternoon at the Golden Day. The proprietor refuses to sell take-out whiskey.
Some of the veterans help carry Norton inside as he has fallen unconscious.
Once they pour some whiskey down his throat, he begins to regain
consciousness. The attendant in charge of the veterans shouts down to ask
what the ruckus is about and a brawl ensues. Norton falls unconscious again,
and the narrator and one of the veterans carry him upstairs near the
prostitutes.
This particular veteran claims to be a doctor and a graduate of the
college. After Norton awakes, the veteran mocks his interest in the narrator
and the college. He claims that Norton must view the narrator as a mark on
his scorecard of achievement, not as a man; and similarly, the narrator must
not relate to Norton as a man either, but as a God or a ‘great white father.’ He
calls the narrator an automaton stricken with a blindness that makes him do
Norton’s bidding. He claims that the narrator’s blindness is Norton’s chief
asset. Norton becomes angry and demands that the narrator take him back to
the college. During the ride back, Norton remains completely silent.
Analysis
The theme of blindness continues with the description of the statue of
the Founder of the college. The statue does not really depict an individual, but
a ‘father symbol.’ It may appear that the Founder has made his mark on
history, but we never even learn his name. His individuality and his humanity
are lost. Only a cold, nameless bronze statue remains. The Founder’s
anonymity echoes the absence of Booker T. Washington’s name in the
narrator’s graduation speech after the battle royal even though the narrator
quotes verbatim large sections of his “Atlanta Exposition Address.”
Washington exercised an enormous political influence over race
relations, but even his name disappears from the history the narrator tells in his
speech. The Founder and Washington become doubles. Both men set out to
design a program for the advancement of black Americans. Both fought for
the right to higher education for black Americans and both are fervently
worshipped by their followers as ‘great visionaries.’ And sadly, both have
become invisible men since not even a record of their names exists in the
novel. The novel also reveals that they are stricken with blindness:
Washington’s program partook of the mistaken illusion that economic
advancement would equal ‘freedom’; while the Founder’s statue shows
‘empty’ eyes.
Just as the dubious rewards of the battle royal incite the narrator and
his classmates to turn on one another, the rewards of social advancement
offered by the college incite the students and faculty to turn their backs on one
of the least-empowered group of American blacks: the poor sharecropper. In
an attempt to conform to the role of the ‘model black citizen’ expected of
them by white trustees, they disown Trueblood for his incestuous act. Perhaps
this dividing influence echoes the grandfather’s statement that blindly
conforming to the ‘good slave’ role equals an act of treachery. Norton’s
character complicates the relationship between the black American
beneficiary of the wealthy, white benefactor’s generosity. His interest in the
college lies less in his genuine desire to improve the difficulties of black
Americans than in his own self-interest. He tells the narrator that he became
involved in the college because, “I felt . . . that your people were somehow
closely connected with my destiny.” He tells the narrator, “You are my fate.”
Norton remains most concerned with his own self-image; he doesn’t even
concede to the narrator the right to claim his fate as his own–instead, their
fates become one.
Norton feels most proud of his work with the college because it has
allowed him to be involved in ‘organizing human life.’ Rather than the students
being his fate, he is, in fact, the organizer of their common fate. He represents
the power of invisibility because despite his absence and distance, his power
allows him to become intimately involved in the lives of thousands of black
students who have never even seen him. There is a chilling undertone to his
words, “You are bound to a great dream and to a beautiful monument.” The
narrator believes the school offers him freedom, but in fact, he is bound to the
dreams and monuments of men like Norton. It becomes a kind of
imprisonment to which both Norton and the narrator are blind.
Norton’s reaction to the Trueblood story is also ironic. He enjoys a
distinct voyeuristic pleasure in Trueblood’s story. Norton’s relationship with
his own daughter suggests that Trueblood’s story allows him to live out
vicariously his own incestuous desires. Norton continually mentions his
daughter’s beauty and purity–at one point, he says, “I could never believe her
to be my own flesh and blood.” He pays Trueblood one hundred dollars for
describing the very sin he himself seems to have wa
the money is meant for Trueblood’s children, but his generosity is tinged with
the same ambiguous significance, the same self-interest that marks his financial
support of the college. The veteran at the Golden Day tavern calls the narrator
an ‘automaton.’ This revives the problematic relationship between white
benefactor and black beneficiary. He directly verbalizes Norton’s narcissism
by stating that Norton sees the narrator as a mark on the scorecard of his
achievement. Neither Norton nor the narrator take kindly to having their
blindfolds removed. The narrator wishes to continue under the illusion that the
college is offering him the freedom to determine his own fate and identity.
However, the vet compares Norton’s position to an invisible puppet-master
pulling the strings and the students’ to that of dancing marionettes: the
blindness of one reinforces the blindness of the other. The vet is labeled
‘crazy’ for daring to see beneath the surface, and for telling the tale of what he
has seen.
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Invisible Man – Chapters 4-6
Summary
Norton asks to be taken to his room and requests that Dr. Bledsoe, the
president of the college, come and see him. Dr. Bledsoe becomes furious
when the narrator informs him of the afternoon’s events. Bledsoe says he
should have known to show powerful white trustees only what the college
wants them to see. When Bledsoe arrives at Norton’s room, he orders the
narrator to leave and go attend the evening chapel service. Later, the narrator
receives a message that Bledsoe wants to speak with him in Norton’s room.
However, he arrives to find only Mr. Norton, who informs him that Bledsoe
had to leave suddenly, but that the narrator should see him after the evening
service. Norton says that he explained to Bledsoe that the narrator was not
responsible for what happened.
Reverend Barbee, a black man wearing dark glasses, speaks at the
chapel service. He tells the story of the Founder, a former slave born into
poverty, but with a precocious intelligence. The Founder was almost killed as
a child when a cousin splashed him with lye, ’shriveling his seed.’ After nine
days in a coma, he awoke as though he had ‘risen from the dead or had been
reborn.’ He taught himself how to read and later became a runaway slave. He
went North and pursued further education. After many years, he returned to
the South and founded the college to which he devoted the rest of his life’s
work. The sermon deeply moves the narrator. Barbee stumbles on the way
back to his chair, his glasses fall from his face, and the narrator catches a
glimpse of his sightless eyes–Barbee is blind.
The narrator meets with Bledsoe after the service. When he learns that
the narrator took Norton to the old slave quarters, the Golden Day and the
Trueblood cabin, Bledsoe becomes very angry. The narrator explains that
Norton ordered him to stop at the cabin. Bledsoe says that white people are
always giving orders, and that the narrator, having grown up in the South as a
black man, should know how to lie his way out of such orders. Bledsoe plans
to investigate both the veteran who mocked Norton and the college; he also
plans to expel the narrator. The narrator threatens to tell everyone that
Bledsoe lied to Norton about not punishing him. Bledsoe is shocked. He has
worked hard to achieve his position of power and doesn’t plan to lose it.
However, he tells the boy to go to New York for the summer and work to
earn his year’s tuition. He offers to send letters of recommendation to some of
the trustees to ensure that he gets work. If he does well, Bledsoe hints that he
will be able to return to school. The next day, the narrator retrieves seven
sealed letters and promises Bledsoe that he holds no resentment for his
punishment. Bledsoe praises his attitude, but the narrator remains haunted by
his grandfather’s prophetic dying words.
Analysis
Bledsoe is a master of masks. Imperious and commanding with the
narrator, he becomes conciliatory and servile with Norton. Bledsoe’s
infuriated response to the narrator’s explanation that he drove Norton to the
old slaves quarters simply because Norton had asked him to aggravates him
further: “Damn what he wants. We take these white folks where we want
them to go, we show them what we want them to see. Don’t you know that?”
The narrator is shocked to learn that the surface appearance of humble
servility is a mask under which Bledsoe manipulates and deceives powerful
white donors to his advantage. He is also shocked that Bledsoe thought he
knew this all along. However, the narrator has had blind faith in the ‘truth’ of
the surface appearance until now.
Moreover, Bledsoe has attempted to preserve the rich donors’
blindness to some aspects of the black experience in the South. He becomes
angry when he learns that the narrator has unwittingly removed the blindfold
from at least one of them. The narrator has disrupted the masquerade of the
‘model black citizen,’ and Bledsoe anxiously seeks to repair the damage. The
narrator’s own blindfold has been removed, and the knowledge he has gained
overwhelms him. He is branded a traitor to the college’s image, and he again
remembers his grandfather’s words: believing in the mask of meekness is
treachery. Bledsoe, echoing Booker T. Washington’s philosophy, practices
humility and preaches the virtue of humble contentment with one’s ‘place’ to
the students; but he has been living the grandfather’s advice and uses it as a
mask to his own advantage.
However, we find that Bledsoe uses his humility mask to dupe the
students as well the white donors. He uses the college and Washington’s
ideology for the preservation of his own position of power rather than for the
broad social progress for his people. While toying with an old leg shackle
from slavery, he explains the narrator’s expulsion by claiming that he has
become ‘dangerous to the college.’ Bledsoe calls the shackle a ’symbol of
progress.’ The narrator’s threat to expose Bledsoe’s double-dealing to Norton
and the rest of the college quickly changes Bledsoe’s manner. Bledsoe tells
the narrator that he has ‘played the nigger’ long and hard to get to his position
and he doesn’t plan to let one young, naive student vanquish his
accomplishments. Thus, we find evidence that that his concern for the
college’s image is really just a mask, a cover up of his selfish concern for his
image.
Bledsoe’s power depends on preventing the narrator from ripping his
mask off and exposing his duplicity. He tells the boy to go to New York for
the summer, and suggests that he might be allowed to return to school in the
fall. It will become clear later that the narrator has still not learned to see
beneath the surface; he trusts Bledsoe and overlooks his , propensity for
double-dealing precisely when he should most remember it. The narrator’s
grandfather advised his family to use masks as a form of self-defense and
resistance against racist white power, but Bledsoe uses it as a weapon against
members of his own race. Moreover, he uses it to achieve an influential
position within the white-dominated power structure rather than as a means to
dismantle it, ultimately revealing the limitations of the grandfather’s philosophy.
Reverend Barbee’s sermon on the Founder develops this theme further.
Every student is expected to attend this service and receive a peculiar
‘education.’ Rather than teaching the students to take advantage of invisibility
through masks like Bledsoe, the sermon reinforces blind faith and allegiance to
the college’s and Bledsoe’s outward philosophy. The sermon treats the
Founder like a god of sorts, whose ideology should be trusted completely like
a religion. The sermon implies that his ideology and his life represent a
universal example that should be followed blindly rather than skillfully
manipulated, as in Bledsoe’s case.
Even the Founder himself, the figure head of the college’s power and
glory, is castrated. In childhood, a cousin threw lye on him and ’shriveled his
seed.’ If the Founder himself is sterile, how can his vision and his legacy be
fertile? His legacy’s ‘offspring’ are a blind preacher, the double-dealing
Bledsoe, and a narcissistic Boston philanthropist who refuses to admit his own
incestuous attraction to his deceased daughter. The Founder’s ‘re-birth’
signifies a form of death: his name is lost to history; and he becomes an empty
symbol manipulated by men like Bledsoe to preserve the blindness of others.
The reverent sermon revives the narrator’s blind love and devotion to the
college and to its program; however, this devotion prompts the narrator to
blindly accept a rotten deal with Bledsoe. Bledsoe’s shackle becomes a
symbol of continuing enslavement to multiple forms of blindness.
>
Invisible Man – Chapters 7-9
Summary
On the bus to New York, the narrator encounters the veteran who
mocked Norton and the college. Bledsoe has arranged to have him
transferred to a psychiatric facility in Washington D.C. The narrator doesn’t
believe Bledsoe could have anything to do with it, but the veteran winks and
tells him to learn to see under the surface of things. He tells the narrator to
hide himself from white people, from authority, from the ‘big man who’s never
there’ but is always ‘pulling his strings.’ Crenshaw, the veteran’s attendant, tells
him that he talks too much. The veteran replies that he verbalizes things that
most men only feel. Before he transfers to another bus, the veteran advises the
narrator, “Be your own father.” The narrator arrives in New York and is
astonished to see a black officer directing white drivers in the street. He sees
a gathering on a sidewalk in Harlem. A man is giving a speech about ‘chasing
them out’ in a West Indian accent. The narrator feels as though a riot could
erupt at any minute. He has seen Ras the Exhorter giving a speech. He quickly
finds a place called the Men’s House and takes a room.
Over the next few days, the narrator delivers all of his letters except
one addressed to Mr. Emerson. After a week, he receives no responses. He
tries to reach the trustees by phone only to receive polite refusals from their
secretaries. His money is beginning to run out, and he entertains vague doubts
about Bledsoe.
The narrator sets out to deliver his last letter and meets a jive-talking
man named Peter Wheatstraw who recognizes his southern roots. He tells the
narrator that Harlem is nothing but a bear’s den, reminding the narrator of the
stories of Jack the Rabbi t and Jack the Bear. He stops for breakfast at a deli.
The waiter says he looks like he’d enjoy the special: pork chops, grits, eggs,
hot biscuits, and coffee. Insulted, the narrator orders orange juice, toast, and
coffee.
The narrator arrives at Mr. Emerson’s office. He meets Mr. Emerson’s
son, a nervous little man. Emerson leaves with the letter only to return with a
vaguely disturbed expression, chattering about his ‘analyst’ and ’some things
being too unjust for words .’ Finally, Emerson allows the narrator to read the
letter: Bledsoe has told each of the addressees that the narrator was
permanently expelled and had to be sent away under false pretenses to
protect the college; he never intended for the narrator to di scover the finality
of his expulsion. Emerson says that his father is a strict, unforgiving man and
will not help him, but he offers to get the narrator a job at the Liberty Paints
plants. That narrator leaves the office full of anger and a desire for r evenge.
He imagines Bledsoe requesting that Mr. Emerson ‘hope the bearer of this
letter to death and keep him running.’ He calls the plant for a job and is told to
report to work the next morning.
Analysis
The reigning ideology in the South for the advancement of black
Americans is that of Booker T. Washington and the college. Both white and
black Southerners practice this ideology. At the Golden Day, the veteran
succinctly pointed out the blindness and en slavement that this ideology entails,
and Bledsoe ‘expels’ him from the South just as he expels the narrator. Unlike
the narrator, however, the veteran has wanted a transfer for years. His
defiance of the masquerade through ‘free speech’ earns him the ‘ freedom’ he
has wanted, but that of course becomes an ironic victory. His trip North leads
only to further confinement in another asylum in the capitol of a nation
purportedly founded on the principles of freedom.
The veteran tries to clarify the power system for the narrator. He tells
the boy to lose his blindness and see under surface appearances because
power works most efficiently when invisible, hidden behind deceptive masks.
The veteran revives the doll met aphor with the image of important men pulling
strings. Those controlling the narrator’s life remain invisible, hidden behind
masks. Pulling his strings, they treat him like an object, not a person.
However, the veteran ascribes the phrase ‘the big man who’s never there’ to
powerful whites. He fails to recognize the manner in which black men like
Bledsoe use this form of power against other black Americans. Ultimately,
Bledsoe himself may remain blind to his own role as a mask behind which
white power and influence can operate and propagate. He uses the same
deceptive means to achieve power. However, as we noted in the last section,
rather than dismantling the white-dominated power structure, he reinforces
and reproduces it.
The veteran represents an old literary trope: the fool. By exploiting the
ambiguity of his comic and tragic role, he defines his version of the truth; and
his fool’s mask allows him to speak openly with fewer consequences.
However, his ambiguous banter keeps the reader unsure of his seriousness.
For instance, when he advises the narrator to be his ‘own father’ before
leaving the bus, he is actually offering his own ‘fatherly advice.’ He is telling the
narrator to define his own identity, while simult aneously defining it for him.
The narrator is on an archetypal journey. Like thousands of black
Americans, he joins the Great Migration North looking for freedom. He
marvels at the variety and vibrancy of Harlem. He sees Ras making an
inflammatory speech in the street calling the b lack Harlem residents to drive
out the whites,