invisible man
..., which he at first declines but once he begins to think about how broke Mary is he feels guilty and reconsiders. He is now a part of the Brotherhood and is given a new identity and apartment. He gives his first speech at a rally in Harlem. At first he feels awkward and forgets the technical materials he’s been given and so he once again speaks from his heart. The Brotherhood is not at all pleased with his speech because they believe in a more rational, scientific approach and it is decided that he will be sent to Brother Hambro for training. After 4 months he is made the chief spokesman for the Harlem district where he meets Brother Tod Clifton. Clifton is a man that the narrator comes to admire and work very closely with. He and Brother Tod have many successes in working for the Brotherhood and against Ras the Exhorter. In spite of his successes there are many in the Brotherhood who work against him. One of them, Brother Wrestrum, brings charges against him and while being investigated his removed from Harlem and moved downtown to work on the Woman Question. While away he is seduced by a married woman. Her husband appears one night and seems unconcerned that they are together. The narrator becomes afraid that this is a setup and that he is being tested by the Brotherhood. He is suddenly called back to Harlem only to find out that Clifton has disappeared and many things have changed while he was gone. Many members have disappeared and the Harlem community feels that he and the Brotherhood have let them down. He finds Clifton on the streets selling Sambo dolls and is appalled. When a policeman approaches Clifton begins fighting him and is shot to death. The invisible man plans to revive the community and save Clifton’s reputation by organizing a grand funeral. He tries to contact the committee to get their approval but is unable to reach any of the members and decides to proceed on his own. The turnout for the funeral is large and when it comes time for the narrator to speak he realizes that he has nothing prepared. Once again he gives an impassioned speech from the heart. The brotherhood is waiting for him when he gets back to the district where they argue about the narrator’s involvement in the funeral. The narrator becomes very disillusioned with the Brotherhood and begins to realize how they have deceived both him and the community. The narrator becomes involved in a riot that has erupted in Harlem. He is chased by 2 men and falls into a manhole and must burn the contents of his briefcase for light. It is here that he realizes that Brother Jack wrote him the anonymous note and that the Brotherhood was responsible for starting the rioting. He decides to stay underground and evaluate his the invisibility that he feels. It is only after he understands the meaning of his grandfather’s advice that he is ready to emerge from underground and return to society. Invisible Man is a novel about a young man’s journey from ignorance to knowledge. Early in the novel, the narrator is very naïve and knows little about how the world around him really works. The narrator develops into a character whose judgments and perceptions you can trust more toward the end of the novel than you can at the beginning. Chametzky states, these themes are the discrepancy between appearance and reality and Ellison’s emphasis upon the individual and his need to achieve self-knowledge, identity and visibility as a complex real human being (Chametzky 168). The narrator begins his story by telling us “All my life I had been looking for something and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve” (15). From the very beginning he believes that he can be a successful person by working hard. He doesn’t yet understand that he is powerless and that lack of power causes him to be invisible to the world. When he graduates from high school he is asked to give a speech to the White leaders of his town. He feels very triumphant and successful. Once he arrives he finds that he must first participate in a battle royal with several other young black men. Blindfolded, they are forced to fight each other for the entertainment of the men. The narrator is only concerned about not being able to give his speech. It doesn’t occur to him that giving his speech isn’t worth the humiliation and degradation he is being forced to endure. Once he gets to college he wants to model himself after the President, Dr. Bledsoe. “He was the example of everything I hoped to be”, the narrator tells us (101). He is rich, successful and a powerful black man in a white man’s world. The narrator misses the other side of Bledsoe. As we see in Chapter 5 Dr. Bledsoe humbles himself before his white guests in the chapel. He behaves exactly as blacks are expected to behave when interacting with whites. Dr. Bledsoe will even hold his own race back in order to keep his position. When the narrator is being expelled from school Dr. Bledsoe tells him “I’ll have every Negro in the country hanging on tree limbs if it means staying where I am”(143). Bledsoe does leave the narrator hanging when he gives him the hope of a job by writing the phony letters or recommendation. When the invisible man arrives in Harlem he is amazed at how Blacks and Whites work and live together. He hasn’t yet started to see beneath the surface of all that civility and supposed equality. It is only the black characters that struggle to maintain jobs and homes and it is the Whites who are controlling those jobs and putting the Blacks out on the street. When the narrator comes upon an eviction his moved by the sight of the old couple and their shabby belongings. He is feeling the stirrings of his past. The old slave couple remind him of where he came from. He has been trying to distance himself from his pas but as he’s watching the eviction he thinks “And why did I see them now, as behind a veil that threatened to lift, stirred by the could wind in the narrow street?”(273) It is an awareness of who he is growing inside of him. When he witnesses the eviction he has been staying with Mary Rambo. The narrator was involved in an accident and needs someone to take care of him, and Mary is that person. She is important to the narrator because she gives him love and takes care of him without asking anything in return. She is a part of that Southern tradition that he has rejected. She is uneducated but is a morally strong woman. The narrator has come to New York in the hopes ...