Invisbile Man

For my seminar, I was grouped with Charlie and Kurt to discuss a close reading of the section where the narrator enrolls into the college to his expulsion in the Invisible Man. This section consisted of chapters 2-9. When the narrator first enters the campus, his descriptions had an uncanny resemblance to the picaraseque novel Candide. Starting from the “lushes vines” to the everlasting sun, the college closely resembled the Garden of Eden from the Bible. Since the Garden of Eden represents innocence, the narrator in the state within the college can then also be represented as his innocent stage. Regarding this, I also found a critical article that talked about this. The article basically stated that the narrator has two fundamentally different methods of solidifying his malleable identity. The first part is before his expulsion, and the second part consists of the sections in the novel after the expulsion. Thus, the expulsion of the narrator can be seen as a fall of innocence. In essence, this situation can be equated to the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. Another interesting aspect I realized about this book after a close reading, is that Dr. Norton is a representation of the historical concept White Man’s Burden. This is the White Man’s imperialistic desires to help the “inferior race”, predominatly the blacks. However, because the narrator is so innocent and naïve at this point in the novel, he is blind to Dr. Norton’s true intentions. He is basically helping others so that he can help himself—fulfil his desires of helping the inferior race. It’s interesting to note that the only character that sees through Dr. Norton’s façade is the veteran the narrator encounters at the Golden Day Tavern. He claims that the narrator is not even looked as a person by Norton. Instead, he is a “score mark” on Norton’s achievement card. This is also where invisibility comes into play. He lacks identity, the narrator is transformed into whatever Norton sees him as, predominatly his imperialistic desires.

I also want to talk about to Dr. Bledsoe’s representation of Booker T. Washington in the novel. There is a perfect description of Bledsoe as being monumentally important among the white folks and the leader of race relations. In terms of history, Booker T. Washington was a preacher of what is now termed Accomadationalism. This is the ideology which stated that the blacks should give up their social rights and instead on focusing economic equality. This suited the whites as they could now give blacks the jobs that were unwanted. I think that Ellison criticizes Washington when he portrays Bledsoe as a manipulative and power-hungry savage. He even claims to be willing to hang all the blacks in the country to retain his position, which can certainly be constituted as selfish. And this is exactly what some of the black population perceived Washington to be. They considered him to be selfish and even a traitor to their own race as he had given up dignity of his own race. Was it worth it? I don’t think so.