Literature Analysis #2

1.     1. The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is about an African-American man who believes he is socially invisible, living underground to write his life’s story. He begins telling the audience about his time in the South at the start of the Great Depression, being humiliated in order to receive scholarships for a prestigious “black college”. The narrator tells of his experiences at college, driving a wealthy white trustee from the college around, and taking him to a bar that serves black people where they are accused of being “blind” to racial conflict after a brawl occurs. He is then expelled from the college on the grounds that he showed the trustee a less-than-ideal version of African-American life. He is sent to New York to find a job with one the trustees of the school. In Harlem, New York, he meets the son of one of the trustees, Mr. Emerson, who tells him the letter of recommendation sent from his school were the exact opposite. He helps the narrator find a low-paying job for a paint company. After being knocked unconscious and temporarily losing his memory in an accident at the factory, the white doctors perform electric shock experiments on him until his memory recovers. After collapsing on the street, the narrator is taken to the home of Mary in Harlem, who allows him to stay for free. She gives him a sense of his heritage. He is offered a position as a spokesperson for the Brotherhood, an organization that supposedly works to help oppressed people, after giving a passionate speech against eviction. The Brotherhood makes him move into a new apartment and he is placed in charge of advancing the interests of the Brotherhood in Harlem. He delivers speeches and becomes a well-known person in the multi-racial Brotherhood. He receives a racist letter from an anonymous member of the Brotherhood, telling him to remember his place as a black man. He is then suspected of selfish intentions and is moved to the women’s rights branch of the organization. After a while, he is sent back to Harlem to find that the community feels betrayed by the Brotherhood. He gets in trouble for holding a funeral for his friend without permission and has to learn the new strategies of the Brotherhood. The narrator is forced to disguise himself in order to escape the men sent to beat him up. After being told of the Brotherhood’s new intentions, the narrator decides to go against them. He gets called to Harlem, one night, to find a riot. One man, who is against the Brotherhood, orders the narrator to be hanged in the midst of the rampage. While fleeing from them, and then the police, the narrator falls down a manhole, where he has stayed since. He says he is now ready to emerge into the world again.

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2.     2. The theme of this novel is to by following the crowd and doing what others want you to do, you become “invisible” and lose sight of yourself.

3.     3. The tone of this novel is angry and reminiscent.

“I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed.”

“If only someone who had known me at school or at home would come along and see me now. How shocked they'd be! I'd push them into a side street and smear their faces with the peel.”

“Then in my mind's eye I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.”

4.    4.  Symbolism- “No, I thought, shifting my body, they're the same legs on which I've come so far from home. And yet they were somehow new. The new suit imparted a newness to me. It was the clothes and the new name and the circumstances. It was a newness too subtle to put into thought, but there it was. I was becoming someone else.”

“What on earth was hiding behind the face of things? If dark glasses and a white hat could blot out my identity so quickly, who actually was who?”

“Then in my mind's eye I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.”

Diction-“ "They're my birthmark," I said. "I yam what I am!"

“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.”

“On his deathbed he called my father to him and said, ‘Son, 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.’”

Setting- “Why do I recall, instead of the odor of seed bursting in springtime, only the yellow contents of the cistern spread over the lawn's dead grass? Why? And how? How and why?”

“Of course I knew he was a founder, but I knew also that it was advantageous to flatter rich white folks. Perhaps he'd give me a large tip, or a suit, or a scholarship next year.”

“’You too can be truly beautiful,’ a sign proclaimed. ‘Win greater happiness with whiter complexion. Be outstanding in your social set.’”

Structure- “I didn't understand in those pre-invisible days that their hate, and mine too, was charged with fear.”

“So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.”

“Our fate is to become one, and yet many -- This in not prophecy, but description.”

Metaphor-“ Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds.”

“Perhaps you'll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form.”

“I had no desire to destroy myself even if it destroyed the machine; I wanted freedom, not destruction.”