Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison

THE STORY

PROLOGUE

You might think of the Prologue as a personal introduction. "I am an invisible man," is the first sentence of the novel. It establishes immediately the fact that this is to be a first-person narrative and that the theme of invisibility- which gives the novel its title- is extremely important. The nameless narrator explains that this invisibility is not literal but metaphorical or symbolic. He is invisible, he tells you, because people don't see him. They see only "my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination." One reason for this is racial. The narrator is a black man, invisible because white people in America refuse to see black people as human beings, as individuals. He is also invisible because he has never developed his own identity but has instead played the roles that other people, especially white people, have required of him. But he doesn't really know that yet. It is something he will come to learn as he tells his life story.

The narrator is living in an abandoned cellar in a section of New York City bordering on Harlem, but it is not a dark cellar. It is lit by 1369 light bulbs, paid for by Monopolated Light & Power, which doesn't know where all that electricity is going. The narrator is fighting white power by draining off their electricity. It is also a warm cellar, a place where he can think and listen to music and try to figure out the meaning of his life up to this point. The narrator presents himself as a man in hiding who is preparing for a return to the real world, where he can take part in some action.

NOTE: LOUIS ARMSTRONG, "WHAT DID I DO / TO BE SO BLACK / AND BLUE?"
Three times in the Prologue the narrator refers to the great black trumpet player and singer, Louis Armstrong, playing and singing this song, a recording of which is available. It is the first of many references to the blues, an important tradition in black music that allows both performer and listener to express their suffering in musical terms, to make art out of their pain and sorrow. Ellison himself writes in his essay, "Richard Wright's Blues," "The Blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near- tragic, near-comic lyricism." The title "Black and Blue" is a pun on both words. It means "bruised" or "hurt." It also means "a member of the black race" and "sad or depressed." Thus, when the narrator asks, in the last line of the Prologue, "What did I do to be so black and blue?", he is asking several questions at the same time. The story that begins in Chapter 1 is the narrator's attempt to answer those questions.

CHAPTER 1

Chapter 1, originally published before the rest of the novel as a short story called "Battle Royal," is the most famous chapter of the novel. It is often discussed by readers as a story complete in itself. You may enjoy reading it as a kind of parable about the general condition of black people in the South before the Civil Rights movement that began in the late 1950s.

The narrator is seventeen or eighteen. He has just graduated from high school in a southern town called Greenwood and has made a speech in the style of Booker T. Washington calling for blacks to be socially responsible and cooperative with whites. He has been invited, as the top-ranked black student, to give the speech again to a group of the leading white male citizens of the town at an evening "smoker" in the ballroom of the town's main hotel. What he does not know is that before he is allowed to give the speech, he must participate with nine other black boys in a "battle royal."

The ten black boys, supplied with shorts and boxing gloves, are herded like cattle into the ballroom, where they are forced to watch a blonde white woman do a provocative striptease, full of sexually arousing movements. The narrator is both attracted and repulsed by this woman. She is a symbol of everything the black man must confront in America. He is made to want her, but told he cannot have her, ordered to watch her, but punished should he show any signs of desiring her. At the same time she is mauled and caressed by drunken white men who can do what they want and go unpunished because they have the power.

The whites are both sadistic and hypocritical. They obviously enjoy watching the black boys suffer and seem to feel no guilt over their own behavior. After the girl is carried out, they blindfold the ten black boys and force them into a ring where they will blindly attack one another and get paid by the whites for it. Many readers have noticed that the "battle royal" is a prefiguration of the ending, where the blacks in Harlem riot, essentially hurting one another, while the whites stand by and watch.

NOTE: BLINDNESS AS SYMBOL
Throughout the novel the contrast between sight and blindness will play a major role. In this scene the symbol of blindness is introduced through the imaginative use of the blindfolds. Reread the battle royal scene and look for the various ways in which the inability to see outwardly parallels the inability to understand inwardly. The narrator is able to avoid being hurt when he can peep through his blindfold. One of the boys breaks his hand because he hits the ring post. The fight is sheer anarchy, because blindness reduces the black boys to nothing more than flailing beasts. How can blacks expect to gain dignity when they are figuratively "blindfolded" by whites?

After a period of time, the blindfolds are removed and the narrator finds himself alone in the ring with a big black named Tatlock. They are expected to box for the championship. At first the narrator does well, but when he hears one of the powerful whites say, "I got my money on the big boy," he stops trying, because he is afraid that he might offend the whites by winning and thus not be asked to make his speech. As a result, he is knocked out.

But his humiliation is not over. When he recovers, the other boys are brought back in, and all of them are told to get their money from a rug covered with coins, bills, and gold pieces. They scramble for the money, only to be violently shocked. The rug has been electrified. This scene is not only horrifying in itself, but as some readers have noticed, it foreshadows the scene in Chapter 11 when the narrator is given electric shock therapy in the factory hospital, again by white people, who find it interesting to "experiment" on blacks.

Before he is allowed to receive the award for achievement, the young narrator is forced to undergo one more humiliation. He must give the speech, his mouth filled with blood and saliva, to an audience of drunks who either mock or ignore him. He is forced to repeat the phrase "social responsibility," and at one point he mistakenly says "social equality." There is a sudden stillness in the room; the boy corrects himself, and everything is all right. But the point of the lesson is clear. Blacks are to rise, but always and only by the rules whites make.

To encourage him along these lines, the white leaders present him with a calfskin briefcase, in which he finds a document announcing his scholarship to the "state college for Negroes." Both of these props are important in the subsequent development of the novel. The briefcase follows the narrator through all his adventures and remains in the hole with him at the end. Most of the narrator's significant possessions wind up in that briefcase. The scholarship, of course, is the first item in the briefcase. More importantly, it is the first of three crucial pieces of paper given to the narrator by white groups. Each of these pieces of paper serves to identify him, name him for a portion of the novel.

The meaning of these documents is suggested in a dream the narrator has at the end of the chapter. He dreams he is at the circus with his strange grandfather and that he is asked to open his briefcase. In it is a letter, and in that another letter, and so endlessly until a final document engraved in gold contains the words: "To Whom It May Concern, Keep This Nigger-Boy Running." At the time the narrator is too young and too naive to understand the meaning of the dream. What is your interpretation?

CHAPTER 2

Three years have passed. The narrator is now a junior at the state college for blacks. He is doing very well and has been such a model student that he is entrusted with the job of chauffeuring important guests around the campus and its surroundings.

NOTE: THE COLLEGE AND ELIOT'S THE WASTE LAND
Before the action of Chapter 2 begins, the narrator describes the college in terms borrowed directly from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. We know that Ellison read the poem during his years at Tuskegee Institute (the model for the college in the novel), and in this section he implies that the college was a kind of waste land by using Eliot's language. "Why does no rain fall through my recollections?" the narrator asks, paralleling the narrator's thoughts of dryness in Eliot. And the phrase "Oh, oh, oh those multimillionaires" is borrowed from Eliot's "O O O O that Shakespeherean Rag." When you get deeper into the book, you will be better able to understand why the narrator views the college as a waste land. What clues do you have at this point?

The chapter opens on Founder's Day, the day set aside each spring to honor the mythical founder of the college. Many of the distinguished white multimillionaires who serve as trustees are present for the occasion. The narrator has been engaged to drive one of them, a Mr. Norton. Since there is plenty of time before Mr. Norton's next engagement, they drive into the country and end up at the run-down farm of a black sharecropper named Jim Trueblood. Mr. Norton wants to find out the age and history of the place, but the narrator is uncomfortable at the thought of stopping. Trueblood had created a scandal by having fathered a child of his own daughter, and the narrator knows the school officials will be furious if they discover that Mr. Norton has been to see Trueblood. But Norton is fascinated, and the more the narrator tells him about Trueblood, the more Norton wants to talk with him. We begin to understand Norton's interest in Trueblood when we remember the white man's conversation with the narrator at the start of the chapter. Norton had been telling the narrator about his only daughter, whom he loved more than anything else in the world. He and his daughter had been traveling in Europe when she died. Norton's gifts to the black college have all been in her memory. Did Norton feel an incestuous attraction to his daughter? Is he fascinated by Trueblood because Trueblood did what he, Norton, wanted (in his blood) to do but was terrified of doing? You will have to decide what you think here, but many readers have found the parallels between Norton and Trueblood intriguing and important.

Norton persuades Trueblood to tell his story. What Trueblood has to say is important not only for what he reveals but also for how he tells it. Trueblood is the first of several important Afro-American folk figures that Ellison creates. He is a storyteller, a singer of spirituals, and a blues singer. He tells Norton, "...while I'm singin' them blues I makes up my mind that I ain't nobody but myself and ain't nothin' I can do but let whatever is gonna happen, happen." This is a lesson that it will take the narrator the entire novel to learn.

Trueblood doesn't think it out before he commits incest with his daughter. He doesn't plan it. Perhaps his name "True" combined with "blood" suggests his character. He is true to himself and he follows his blood. The incest takes place almost in a dream where he can feel his body doing it without his mind really knowing that it is happening. Afterwards his wife Kate nearly kills him with an axe, but he decides to stay with his wife and daughter and both their children. He will live the best he can, no matter what people say. The blacks at the college hate him (and, of course, the narrator is one of them) because they see him as the sort of black man they are trying not to be. But white people are fascinated by Trueblood. They give him money and come to hear his story, and so he ends up much better off than he was before the incident. Norton, too, gives Trueblood $100 after hearing the story, and the narrator is furious. "You no good bastard!" he says under his breath, not wanting to offend the white man, and the scene is complete.

CHAPTER 3

The shock of Trueblood's story has made Mr. Norton feel faint, and he asks the narrator to get him some whiskey. The only place the narrator can think to take him is the Golden Day, a wild combination of tavern and house of prostitution that is- like Trueblood's place- off limits to the college students. It is a world that the leaders at the college pretend does not exist. Just as the narrator pulls up to the Golden Day, a group of black war veterans from the local state hospital are on their way to the place for their weekly recreation. They have all been affected mentally by their war experience and exhibit a variety of bizarre symptoms. They allow the narrator's car to pass when he tells them he is driving General Pershing, their commander in the war.

The narrator doesn't want Mr. Norton to see the patients or the girls; so he asks the bartender to let him take the whiskey to the car. The bartender refuses, and there is no way to revive Norton, who has by now passed out, except to carry him into the Golden Day and pour the whiskey down his throat. Norton revives, but at this moment a huge black named Supercargo, who is the attendant, appears on the balcony. The vets hate him and charge the stairs. A riot breaks out, and in the process the narrator loses Mr. Norton. Finally, he finds him, passed out again, under the stairs. This time some of the vets carry Norton upstairs to one of the prostitute's rooms where he is again revived and cared for by a whore named Edna and a patient named Burnside, who was a doctor before the war.

NOTE: BURNSIDE
The fat veteran-patient who takes care of Mr. Norton in this chapter makes a brief but significant appearance (you see him only once more, in Chapter 7, on the bus to New York). He is the first black man who talks openly to a white man, and that fact scares the narrator, who is too intimidated by whites to realize that they are just human beings, too. Burnside is a doctor, and he not only knows that Norton needs help ("He's only a man. Remember that."), but he knows that the narrator is "a walking zombie! Already he's learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity." Burnside tries to teach the narrator a lesson about life, but the narrator is too rigid, too narrow-minded at this point in his life to get the message. So is Mr. Norton. They both see the important work of black-white relations as somehow tied to the college. Burnside, especially, and the other vets at the Golden Day are trying to say that the work must be done in the real world. Since Trueblood and Burnside are an important part of the narrator's education, why does he reject them at this point in his life?

The chapter ends with the narrator and Mr. Norton being literally thrown out the door of the Golden Day. Mr. Norton, who it seemed was nearly dead, makes a strong recovery and walks to the car unaided. "DEAD!" says the bartender, Halley. "He cain't die!" The statement, like so many others, has multiple meanings, one of which is that the white money that Norton represents is always there. It can't be killed. Can you think of other interpretations of this passage?

CHAPTER 4

The narrator, full of fear, drives Mr. Norton back to the campus. The life he has found for himself at the college means everything to him. His goal is to imitate Mr. Bledsoe, the president, by becoming an educator, by returning to teach at the college after he has completed his own training. He hates Jim Trueblood and the vets at the Golden Day for ruining his life, because all he can see now is that he will surely be dismissed for what has happened to Mr. Norton. And yet, somehow, it does not seem to be his fault. It just happened!

But whether it is his fault or not, he must face the consequences in the person of the furious Dr. Bledsoe. He lashes out at the narrator in language that the narrator has never heard before. "Damn what he wants," says Bledsoe about Mr. Norton, "we take these white folks where we want them to go, we show them what we want them to see." The narrator cannot believe he is hearing such talk from Dr. Bledsoe, who has always been so humble and dignified and apparently obedient to the wishes of white people. In front of Mr. Norton, Bledsoe returns to the role of the polite but humble black educator; alone with the narrator he is blunt and brutal, but the narrator is too naive to grasp what is going on.

He returns to his room and tries to puzzle out Bledsoe's behavior, but before he can, a message sends him back to Mr. Norton's room at Rabb Hall. Mr. Norton is a different person now. Bathed and dressed in fresh clothes, he is the distant northern trustee you might have expected to meet earlier. He is civil but cool toward the narrator and informs him that he is leaving the college that evening and will no longer require the narrator's services. He sends the boy out the door, reminding him that he is to see Dr. Bledsoe in his office after vespers.

CHAPTER 5

Chapter 5 consists almost entirely of a long, brilliantly written sermon delivered by Reverend Homer A. Barbee of Chicago. The occasion for the sermon is Founder's Day, and the purpose of the sermon is to honor the unnamed founder of the college, a man whose life and work Barbee transforms into a myth, almost a religion.

NOTE: THE "FOUNDER" AND BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
The college in the novel is modeled in part on Tuskegee Institute, which Ellison attended from 1933 to 1936. The great black leader Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) founded Tuskegee in 1881 and ran it on the fundamental principles of "separate but equal," which became both custom and law in the South during the 1890s. Washington encouraged blacks to learn useful trades and not to aspire to equality with whites. He was an astute fund raiser and a politically adept leader who succeeded in building Tuskegee into a major national force in black education. You may wish to explore the extent to which the founder in the novel is modeled on Washington.

As the narrator waits for the sermon to begin, he thinks of the many hours he has sat on those hard benches and listened to the choir sing songs demanded by the distinguished white visitors. He thinks of the times he has spoken and debated as a student leader, and he watches Dr. Bledsoe, distinguished in his swallowtail coat and striped trousers, seating the white guests on the platform.

At this point you must read very carefully. Ellison uses a technique that recurs throughout the novel. He lets the narrator tell you something with a straight face, but invites you to see the humor or the irony that the narrator misses. Speaking of Bledsoe's arrival at the college as a child, he tells us: "I remember the legend of how he had come to the college, a barefoot boy who in his fervor for education had trudged across two states. And how he was given a job feeding slop to the hogs but had made himself the best slop dispenser in the history of the school...." From slop dispenser he rises to office boy and from office boy to educator, from educator to president, from president to statesman, "who carried our problems to those above us, even unto the White House."

How are you to take this story? Or the story of the Founder, told by the black minister, Homer A. Barbee, which makes the Founder seem like a combination of Moses and Jesus Christ? In both cases, the stories are obviously exaggerated. The myths of Bledsoe and the Founder endow these men with almost superhuman qualities. If you can understand why, then you can enjoy what Ellison is doing and what the narrator misses. It suits the college to mythologize Bledsoe's past. It suits Homer A. Barbee to make the Founder into a religious figure worthy of worship, because these legends and myths create loyalty in their followers. These legends keep the white philanthropists giving money and keep the students following their teachings. When the narrator hears Barbee's beautiful story of the life of the Founder, born a slave but devoted from his early childhood to learning, he feels guilty that he has wronged the college by his mistakes, and he believes that he, not Bledsoe, is the one who has acted improperly.

All the students are moved by the sermon, and they join in song, this time one sincerely felt. The narrator feels confused and apart, and when the orchestra plays excerpts from Antonin Dvorak's symphony From the New World he keeps hearing strains of his mother and his grandfather's favorite spiritual, "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot." Too moved to listen, he leaves the chapel and hurries out into the dark.

NOTE: HOMER A. BARBEE
Ellison enjoys using symbols. At the end of Homer A. Barbee's speech, he stumbles and falls, his dark glasses drop to the floor, and the narrator realizes that the man is blind. The combination of his name and blindness suggest his role. He is Homer, the blind Greek bard (bard = barbee?), who sings the praises of his heroes, Bledsoe and the Founder, as Homer sang the praises of the Greek and Trojan warriors on the plains of Troy.

CHAPTER 6

The moment the narrator has been dreading arrives: the confrontation with Bledsoe. Mostly dialogue, this would be a powerful scene to read aloud with a friend or to act out in front of a class. Bledsoe tears into the narrator for taking Norton to Trueblood's and the Golden Day. He accuses the boy of dragging the name of the college into the mud, and he expels him. But the narrator doesn't take it lying down. He fights back, calling Bledsoe a liar for going back on his word to Mr. Norton that he would not punish him. Bledsoe shocks the boy by suddenly changing tactics. He admires the boy's fight, and he levels with him for a moment. "I'm still the king down here," he tells the narrator, "and I will do whatever I have to do to keep my power. I'll have every Negro in the country hanging on tree limbs by morning if it means staying where I am."

Like an expert boxer, he shoots jabs and hooks at the narrator's weak defenses, reducing him to helplessness. You begin to see the implications of Bledsoe's name- he "bleeds his people so" in order to secure and advance his own power. He works with the whites because it suits him. This is too much for the narrator to handle. He thinks of all the events of this one day- Trueblood, Mr. Norton, the Golden Day, the vespers sermon, and now Bledsoe's confession. What does it all mean? He thinks of his grandfather, who had told him on his deathbed (at the outset of Chapter 1) "to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction." For a moment he wonders if his grandfather's advice has not been right. But he cannot let himself believe that his true role in life ought to be the undermining of white society. No, the school is right, Bledsoe is right, he thinks. He decides to accept his punishment, go to New York, and continue to build his "career" from there.

The next morning he rises early, packs his bags, and goes to Bledsoe's office to ask a favor: He would like letters of recommendation to some of the trustees, who then might help him find a job. With the job he will be able to earn the money to come back to school. He will suffer his punishment and return. Bledsoe seemingly agrees and gives the boy seven sealed letters. He is not to open them under any circumstances.

CHAPTER 7

Chapter 7 is a transitional chapter between two major sections of Invisible Man. Ellison does not divide the novel into formal parts or books, so you must make the divisions yourself. Many readers place a major break here in Chapter 7, following Ellison's own suggestion. In "The Art of Fiction: An Interview," Ellison says, "Each section begins with a sheet of paper; each sheet of paper is exchanged for another and contains a definition of his identity, or the social role he is to play as defined for him by others." (See The Critics section for the entire passage.)

The first piece of paper referred to seems to be the scholarship given him in Chapter 1. The second piece of paper may well be the letters given to him by Bledsoe at the end of Chapter 6. These letters will define his identity in New York in Chapters 7 to 9. But first he has to get there, and much of Chapter 7 is taken up with the bus trip to New York, where he meets again the vet-patient-doctor from Chapter 3, Burnside. Burnside is being transferred to St. Elizabeth's mental hospital in Washington and is being accompanied on the trip by an attendant named Crenshaw.

Burnside, as he did in Chapter 3, plays the role of the wise fool. He knows the truth, and for his knowledge he is called crazy. Bledsoe, it seems, has had him transferred to St. Elizabeth's to get him out of the way. For those who run the system, people like Burnside are dangerous, because they threaten to expose the truth. During the bus ride, Burnside gives the narrator some good advice about life, experience and self-knowledge. He tells him to play the game, but "play it in your own way.... Learn how it operates."

The narrator seems to understand little of what Burnside is saying. He is too young, too tired, too lonely, and too scared. At this moment all he can think of is survival. He gets to New York and is terrified by the mass of bodies crushed together in the subway that takes him uptown. Everything is new to him- the huge city with its impersonal masses, the mixture of black and white he had never seen in the South, the noise, the strange sight of a short black rabble-rouser named "Ras," who will much later in the novel figure very significantly. He has arrived in Harlem.

CHAPTER 8

The narrator settles in at Men's House in Harlem, a respectable place for young men "on the way up," as he believes himself to be. He rejects the Bible in the room as fit reading for someone in New York; instead, he spreads his seven letters from Bledsoe on the dresser and admires them. He believes they are his ticket to success, and he starts out early the next morning to deliver them, one at a time, to the important people to whom they are addressed. Most of these people work on Wall Street, and at first the narrator is frightened of the tall buildings and the swiftly moving crowds of white businessmen. He thinks people suspect him of some crime because he is black. But he finally gathers the courage to go into one of the buildings, and after he has delivered the first letter, delivering the others is easier. But the letters do not seem to do any good. All the recipients say they will contact him, but no one does. He tries to reach them by telephone, but he can never get past the secretaries. Something is wrong, but he doesn't know what it is.

Finally, he has only one letter left, the one addressed to Mr. Emerson, and rather than taking the letter and risking rejection, he telephones, saying that he has an important message for Mr. Emerson from Dr. Bledsoe. Just as his money is about to run out, he receives a letter from Mr. Emerson inviting him to the office.

CHAPTER 9

Chapter 8, a brief chapter, was largely devoted to forwarding the action. Chapter 9 is more central to the themes of the novel. In it you are introduced to two important figures: Peter Wheatstraw and young Mr. Emerson. As the narrator leaves Men's House, he sees a black man pushing a cart and singing the famous "Boogie Woogie Blues" by Count Basie and Jimmy Rushing. His name is Peter Wheatstraw, and he does something significant: He makes the narrator think of his southern folk roots. He recognizes the narrator as a fellow black from "down home," and he asks him a series of questions, using language common among less educated southern blacks. He does so deliberately to remind the narrator that he is part of that folk tradition. The narrator rejects him. He's too proud, too educated to acknowledge an illiterate southern black like Peter Wheatstraw. "Why you trying to deny me?" Wheatstraw asks. The question is important. The narrator has been trying since the opening chapter to deny his heritage, to act like an educated white man. He is ashamed of himself and his heritage. He can see no value in it. Peter Wheatstraw, the blues singer, ballad maker, fast-talking "seventhsonofaseventhsonbawnwithacauloverbotheyes," is there to remind the narrator that rejecting the blues and folk tradition means rejecting his humanity.

But the narrator isn't ready yet to get the message. He has a momentary flash of admiration for Peter, and the blues strike a chord of recognition. But it passes, and he goes into a restaurant and orders orange juice, toast, and coffee instead of pork chops, grits, one egg, biscuits, and coffee because he doesn't want the people to think he is a southern country boy.

After breakfast he goes to Mr. Emerson's office, hopeful it will be his lucky day. What happens to him here is one of the major turning points in the novel. Young Mr. Emerson, the son of the Emerson to whom the letter was addressed, is in the office. He takes the letter, then invites the invisible man into the inner office. There follows a remarkable conversation that lasts for eight or ten pages. Mr. Emerson tries to persuade the narrator to go to a different college, somewhere in the North, perhaps. But the narrator is not interested. He wants to earn the money to go back to his own college. Mr. Emerson grows increasingly disturbed. He asks more questions. Has the narrator opened the letters? How many letters were there? Does he believe that two strangers, one white and one black, can be friends? The narrator wonders what is going on, and you are as puzzled as he unless you have figured the truth out first. Perhaps you have. The truth is that the letters are frauds: the letters, rather than helping the narrator, carefully instruct their readers to do nothing for the narrator and to keep him in the dark about the truth. All this, the letters conclude, is in the best interests of the college. You now understand the significance of the narrator's dream at the end of Chapter 1, where he opens the envelope and reads the message: "To Whom It May Concern- Keep This Nigger-Boy Running." For that is exactly what Bledsoe's letters instruct the white trustees to do. And the narrator never suspected it. Again, the narrator has lost his identity. The letters were all he had, and he remembers the old folk song, "Well they picked poor Robin clean." It seems especially appropriate for him at this moment.

But young Mr. Emerson is not old Mr. Emerson. He is not content with reading the letter and dismissing the boy. As we have noted in The Characters section, he may represent the young, liberal white who wants to be "pals" with the black man. He thinks of himself as Huckleberry Finn and the narrator as "Nigger Jim." He wants to work off his own guilt by taking the narrator to nightclubs and listening to jazz. He wants to be cool and modern and go to the Club Calamus (see The Characters for an analysis of the name). At the end of the chapter he honestly believes that his revelation of the truth about the letters has genuinely helped the narrator. But has it?

NOTE: THE NAME "EMERSON"
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was the most influential writer in America during the first half of the nineteenth century. His essays "Nature," "The American Scholar," and "Self Reliance" urged Americans, young Americans particularly, to think for themselves and base their ideas on personal intuition rather than convention. He was also an active supporter of the abolition of slavery and a believer in the equality of all men. As noted in The Author and His Times, Ellison was named for Emerson, and he appreciated the significance of the name. Why, then, you might ask, is the central figure in this chapter named Emerson? The issue has been discussed in the The Characters section, and you might find it useful to review that section now in the context of Chapter 9.

At the end of the chapter the narrator is furious. He leaves the office and returns to Men's House with "they picked poor Robin clean" on his brain. He swears revenge on Bledsoe. But before he can kill Bledsoe, he has to have a job. So he takes a job at the Liberty Paint Factory, the place Mr. Emerson has sent a number of young men before. The juxtaposition of the projected murder and the job is wonderfully ironic, and allows you to see, once more, the difference between the hero's real character and his perception of himself. Poor Robin!

CHAPTER 10

If you are the adventuresome type, you will have a field day with Chapter 10. It's one of the liveliest, most imaginative chapters in the novel. Because it is symbolic, it will challenge you from beginning to end to use your mind while you are reading.

The narrator arrives at the plant on Long Island and sees a huge electric sign announcing KEEP AMERICA PURE WITH LIBERTY PAINTS. As he enters one of the buildings and walks down a "pure white hall," you are alerted to the fact that the plant is going to be a symbol for white America. The company's trademark is "a screaming eagle," and they specialize in white paint, pure white paint, which they sell to the government. Apparently the Liberty Paint Company uses a number of "colored college boys" so that they don't have to pay union wages. But the black workers are well hidden.

The narrator is sent by Mr. MacDuffy to work for a Mr. Kimbro, the terrible Mr. Kimbro (who is called "Colonel"- perhaps suggesting the tyranny of the colonels of the Old South over blacks) in the paint-testing department. Kimbro's job is to inspect the paint before it is loaded, and he shows the narrator how to assist him. The paint looks brown on the surface, before it is mixed, but after it is stirred, the brown disappears and the paint turns white. But Kimbro is not satisfied. The paint isn't white enough, and so he directs the narrator to put ten drops of black coloring into each bucket to make it a purer white- "Optic White," which is the company's specialty. It doesn't make much sense to the narrator to use black coloring to make paint white, but Kimbro says, "You just do what you're told and don't try to think about it."

Kimbro has to go to a production conference, and the narrator runs out of coloring. So he goes to the tank room to get more but finds that there are two tanks that look exactly alike. He picks the tank that smells most like the coloring, refills his bucket, and completes the job. When Kimbro comes back, he is furious. The narrator, by thinking for himself, has picked the wrong tank and used concentrated remover instead. Kimbro has him put the proper coloring into the cans with the remover and seems satisfied that the problem has been solved, even though the narrator thinks the paint looks a little gray.

How do you interpret the symbolism of this little story? If the black coloring stands for black people, then how are black people used to make white America work? "Optic White" means white in appearance, or to the eye, as in optical illusion. The white paint is not really white, as America is not really white, but it requires blacks behind the scenes in cooperation with whites to make the white world work. What kinds of blacks does white America need to have in order to keep up this facade? Perhaps Mr. Kimbro's treatment of the narrator suggests the answer.

NOTE: EXPRESSIONISM
In the section on "Style" Ellison was quoted as saying that the style of the novel was at first realistic, but that it became expressionistic after the narrator moved North. Chapters 10 and 11 are perhaps the best examples of Ellison's expressionism (review the Style section for a definition). Chapters 10 and 11 are hard to believe literally. If you read them as realistic pictures of life in a paint factory, you will be disappointed. What Ellison is doing here is trying to depict expressionistically what white America is doing to blacks for its own selfish ends. The real action of these chapters is inner, not outer.

In the second half of Chapter 10, the scene shifts to the basement of Building No. 2. Kimbro has sent the narrator here, because he doesn't want anyone who thinks for himself working for him. Thinking creates trouble! The narrator's boss in the basement is an old black man named Lucius Brockway. Brockway makes the guts of the paint down in this deep basement. Again, note the symbolism. Deep underground a black man makes the guts of the white paint that keeps this white factory going. Not only does he make it, he is the one who coined the slogan, "If It's Optic White, It's the Right White." The narrator realizes that this is just another way of saying, "If you're white, you're right."

If you are enjoying the fun of Ellison's complex symbolism, you have probably figured out that Lucius Brockway is like the ten drops of black coloring the narrator had to pour in the bucket to make Optic White look white. Without the black man in the basement doing the dirty work, the whites would be lost. No one knows how to make the paint except Lucius. If he retired, the place would collapse. And he likes it. He is the perfect Uncle Tom. He sacrifices himself (he keeps out of sight) to keep the whites white.

The narrator and Lucius get along well until the narrator stumbles across a union meeting on his way to get his lunch out of his locker. The union people think he is a fink, a hired strike breaker, because he works for Lucius, whom they hate. Then, when the narrator returns, Lucius calls him a louse for attending the union meeting. The Invisible Man can't win.

The narrator may be naive, but he is a fighter. Just as he argued with Bledsoe and young Mr. Emerson, he holds his own with Lucius Brockway, and because he is younger and physically stronger, he can force Brockway to back down. Brockway finally admits that he doesn't like the union because it is critical of the white bosses. The union threatens the relationship between white power and black Uncle Toms. But just as the narrator thinks that peace has been restored, Brockway notices that the pressure gauge his new assistant is supposed to have been watching has gone way up. The narrator has literally "blown it" again. There is a huge explosion, and the narrator is knocked unconscious into a "blast of black emptiness that was somehow a bath of whiteness." The symbolism of the chapter is complete. The black man is immersed in a world of white.

CHAPTER 11

If the primary symbolism of Chapter 10 is black vs white, then Chapter 11 operates around the symbolism of death and rebirth. In this chapter the narrator, who has been symbolically killed in Chapter 10, is resurrected with a new identity.

The action takes place in the factory hospital, where the narrator has been taken after the explosion. He is examined and then subjected to electric shock treatment. After the electric shock, he wakes to find himself lying in "a kind of glass and nickel box." He is being used for some sort of experiment. He hears men talking outside the box. One is a surgeon who would like to do a prefrontal lobotomy on him, or perhaps, castration. The surgeon wants to cut out of the black man anything that would allow him to be thoughtful or creative, in any sense.

The other man is the inventor of the machine in which the narrator finds himself. The man believes that his machine- with its electric shock- will have all the positive effects of the surgery (making the black man docile and cooperative) without the negative effects. The two argue over the narrator as if he were some kind of object, finally deciding to use the machine. After another series of shocks, the narrator feels himself in a warm, watery world. It is as if he is an infant being born.

He emerges from the womb, and people begin to ask him questions. WHAT IS YOUR NAME? WHAT IS YOUR MOTHER'S NAME? WHO WAS BUCKEYE THE RABBIT?

NOTE: BUCKEYE THE RABBIT
In Afro-American folklore, Buckeye the Rabbit is the same as Brer Rabbit. Both had the reputation in a variety of tales of being able to escape from the most difficult predicaments by their cleverness and toughness. The most famous of these tales is the story of the Tar Baby, to which Ellison refers more than once in the novel. Perhaps the narrator, like Brer Rabbit, escapes from the machine because he remembers these stories from his childhood and they help give him a toughness, an identity of sorts, at a time when the whites are trying to destroy it altogether. Because he says nothing to them, they don't know what he is thinking.

As the chapter ends, the narrator is released from the hospital, having been pronounced "cured." The whites believe that he is "safe" now, that he will not do any more harm, because he has lost his old identity entirely. They get him to sign some release papers, and they will pay him compensation in return for a promise not to hold them responsible. He leaves the hospital, remembering the song he sang at the end of Chapter 9: "They picked poor Robin clean."

CHAPTER 12

Chapter 12 is a transitional chapter, marking the end of the first half of the novel and the beginning of the second. The narrator emerges from the subway onto Lenox Avenue in Harlem feeling like an infant. Totally helpless after his experience in the hospital, he needs someone to care for him, and that someone appears in the person of Mary Rambo (see The Characters).

The narrator is a child who needs a mother, and Mary- big bosomed, deep-voiced, patient, and loving- has been created for the role. She takes him to her boarding house, puts him to bed, and watches over him until he is strong enough to go back to Men's House. She invites him to come back and stay, where she can care for him and keep him from becoming corrupted by New York.

He returns to Men's House, but he is not the same man who left it: "My overalls were causing stares and I knew that I could live there no longer, that that phase of my life was past." He can no longer dream of moving up in the white man's world. And because he no longer has that dream, his vision of Men's House changes. He (in his painter's overalls) sees the young men with their Brooks Brothers suits and briefcases and umbrellas as a bunch of phonies. As he starts toward the elevator he sees a figure in front of him whom he immediately believes to be Bledsoe. In his mind he calls him "Bled," appropriate for the man who has "bled" him so. Suddenly all the hate and frustration in him rises, and he picks up a brass spittoon full of "brown liquid" and dumps it over the man's head. But it is not Bledsoe! Instead, it is a well-known Baptist minister, and the narrator is forced to run for cover. This is the last he sees of Men's House; they have barred him for "ninety- nine years and a day."

His old identity is gone, and a new one has started to grow within him. He returns to Mary's as a child returns to its parent. She nurtures him, but she also pushes him, as a mother, to grow up and do something responsible. He senses that she is right, but he doesn't know what to do. He has no contacts, no job, no direction. His compensation money is running out, and winter is coming on. His head is full of voices, full of the desire to speak out (but about what he doesn't know). He tries to face the reality of his condition for the first time. The invisible man is on the verge of discovering a new self, another identity.

CHAPTER 13

Chapter 13 is the central chapter of the novel. In a novel with 25 chapters, a Prologue, and an Epilogue, it is near the exact middle. That is no accident, for in this chapter the narrator undergoes the most important event in his life thus far: He finds a calling as a spokesman for his people. There are three important events in the chapter: (1) the episode with the yam seller, (2) the narrator's speech at the eviction, and (3) his first conversation with the dominant figure of the second half of the novel, Brother Jack.

As the chapter opens, the narrator is profoundly unsettled. He has no job, no money, no identity. As he rushes out of the house into the street, he runs into the yam seller, an old man "wrapped in an army overcoat, his feet covered with gunny sacks, his head in a knitted cap...." Had the narrator run into the yam seller even as much as two or three chapters earlier, he would have avoided him as the very type of black man he most disapproved of- an old country black, uneducated, crude, and poor. But something in the factory experience has changed the narrator, and the yams remind him of home, of his family and childhood. He is hungry- both literally and figuratively- for the hot yams, bubbling with butter and syrup. He buys one and eats it, right there on the street. All at once he has what James Joyce called an "epiphany"- a sudden moment of illumination, of insight into himself. He says, "It was exhilarating. I no longer had to worry about who saw me or about what was proper... to hell with being ashamed of what you liked. No more of that for me."

He buys two yams and eats them on the street for all to see. He feels a new sense of freedom, and he announces, "I yam what I am."

He suddenly thinks of proper Dr. Bledsoe, that model of propriety, eating chitterlings secretly in private so white men won't see him. He laughs and accuses Bledsoe of being a secret chitterling eater, of "relishing hog bowels." He will expose Bledsoe as a fraud.

NOTE: CHITTERLINGS
Sometimes called "chitlins" or "chittlings," chitterlings are the cooked small intestines of hogs. In this section, Ellison has the narrator mention not only chitterlings, but also pigs' ears, pork chops, black-eyed peas, and mustard greens. All these are foods commonly eaten by southern blacks. Bledsoe and the narrator have been trying to deny both their blackness and their southern heritage. They have denied their fundamental roots in black folk culture. The narrator suddenly realizes that he really likes these foods, but that he has stopped eating them because he is afraid of what others will think.

Armed with this new understanding about himself, that I am what I am, I am what I like, I can choose what I want to do on the basis of personal preference, the narrator feels both free and frightened. This new ability to be one's self implies the making of personal choices. He has never done that. He always did what others expected of him. As he thinks about this, he comes upon a scene in the street. An old black couple is being evicted from their apartment. All their personal belongings and furniture are being piled in the street by white marshals. A crowd has gathered, sullen, angry, resentful at what is being done.

The narrator has never seen an eviction. His eyes are opened for the first time to the reality of black life in America. He has always worked for whites. Now he begins seeing, both literally and figuratively. He sees the couple's possessions on the street, and he understands the meaning of these possessions. It is as if his own grandparents are being evicted. He feels a sense of emotional identification with these old people. They are his people. "It is as though I myself was being dispossessed of some painful yet precious thing which I could not bear to lose...."

The old woman, Mrs. Provo, tries to go back into the house to pray one last time, but the marshals refuse to let her. One of them strikes her, and suddenly the mob becomes angry. Then almost without warning the narrator becomes a leader. He fears the violence of the crowd and of himself, and he starts speaking to the group, trying to move the people to constructive action instead of useless violence. All the speeches he made in school and college seem to have prepared him for this moment. The words come pouring out. He plays on the theme of dispossession, saying that all blacks are dispossessed, and he tries to persuade the marshals to let them all go in and pray. The crowd, moved by his speech, rushes past the marshals into the house, punching and beating them as they go. The narrator himself is caught up in the emotion of the scene. "Let's go in and pray," he shouts, "But we'll need some chairs." From chairs it is just a step to everything else, and the crowd excitedly starts carrying all the articles from the street back into the house.

At this point the narrator notices two white people, a man and a woman, who don't seem to be marshals. They act friendly, but not like anyone the narrator has ever seen before. They encourage the people to have a protest march, but before anything can be organized, the police come and break up the scene. The white woman tells the narrator to escape across the roofs of the buildings. "The longer you remain unknown to the police, the longer you'll be effective," she says. The narrator doesn't understand what she's saying, but he does what she suggests. He takes off across the roofs, followed by the white man who seems to be chasing him. He outdistances the man, goes down the stairs of another building at the end of the block, and walks out into the street. The police are nowhere to be seen, but he has not lost the man, who comes up to him and says, "That was a masterful bit of persuasion, brother."

The man takes the narrator to a cafeteria, buys him coffee and cheesecake (which the narrator has never tasted), and explains who he is. His name is Brother Jack and he works for an organization known as the Brotherhood. He is impressed with the narrator's speaking ability and wants him to join the organization and become a spokesman in Harlem, "someone who can articulate the grievances of the people." The narrator is hesitant. What is this organization? What do they want with him? Are they just interested in using him like everyone else? He thinks about it, then turns Brother Jack down, but he takes his phone number in case he changes his mind. Another important piece of paper!

NOTE: THE BROTHERHOOD AND THE COMMUNIST PARTY
Much has been written by a variety of critics about the relationship between the Brotherhood and the Communist party. Ellison himself comments on it in his "Art of Fiction" interview, and the American scholar and social critic Irving Howe (see The Critics) discusses it in some detail. This study guide comments on Ellison's relation to the Communists in the The Author and His Times section. While Ellison did not intend the Brotherhood to represent only the Communist party, he never denied that the parallel was valid. The Brotherhood may represent any organization that uses individuals and/or minority groups to enhance its own cause. We will explore this topic further as we go along.

CHAPTER 14

The narrator returns to Mary's and smells cabbage cooking. Since it's the third time this week Mary has cooked cabbage, the narrator assumes rightly that Mary must be short of money. He stops to think about Brother Jack's offer. Maybe he has made a mistake. How can he turn down a job when Mary needs the money and he is several months behind in his rent payments? Quickly he changes his mind and calls Brother Jack, who tells him to go to an address on Lenox Avenue. Here the narrator is picked up and whisked off through Central Park downtown to "an expensive-looking building in a strange part of the city." The building is called the Chthonian.

NOTE: CHTHONIAN
In Greek mythology this is the name for the realm of the underworld, the realm of the dead. Why has Ellison chosen this name for the building in which the Brotherhood has its meetings? Is the narrator, in some sense, descending into the underworld by joining the Brotherhood? There is an eerie feeling in the building, with its "lobby lighted by dim bulbs" and its elevator that moves in such a way that the narrator is "uncertain whether we had gone up or down." Ellison, as always, is having fun with his symbols.

Brother Jack leads the narrator into an apartment in which a party is going on. The hostess at the party is a woman named Emma, who looks at the narrator in a way quite different from women in the South, a way that makes him uncomfortable. He is taken into the library for a meeting. Point blank he is asked if he would like to be the new Booker T. Washington.

NOTE: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
Booker T. Washington's name is mentioned several times in this chapter. In an earlier note during the discussion of Chapter 5, the parallels between Booker T. Washington and the Founder were discussed. In this chapter, Ellison seems to contradict himself by having the narrator contrast the Founder with Booker T. Washington, treating them as two totally distinct people. You may find this confusing. The author appears to be using Booker T. Washington here for a different purpose than he did in Chapter 5. If you remember that Washington was the white man's idea of the perfect black leader, then the question "Would you like to be the new Booker T. Washington?" becomes highly ironic. It might suggest, "Would you like to be our man in Harlem?" Clearly, Ellison, if not the narrator, has a very ambivalent attitude toward Booker T. Washington.

The narrator accepts the job with the Brotherhood and is immediately given money to pay off his debts, buy new clothes, and change living places. He is to have a totally new identity with no connections whatsoever to the past. He is to leave Mary's, break contact with his parents, and learn his new name, which is handed to him in an envelope by Brother Jack- just as his other identities had been handed to him in envelopes by various people. He is to think of himself as being the new person.

The business over, the new brother is escorted back to the party and introduced to the others. A drunk white man at the piano asks the narrator to sing. After all, all black men sing black folk songs! The moment is extremely embarrassing. Brother Jack is furious and has the drunk brother removed from the room. The narrator, who might have taken offense, treats the matter lightly and the rest of the guests, obviously relieved, apologize for the attitude of their "backward" brother.

Throughout the party scene Ellison reminds you how limited and hypocritical most whites are in understanding and treatment of blacks. The drunk man, like many whites, assumes that the narrator can sing and entertain just because he's black. On the other hand, the more "advanced" whites assume that the narrator understands history, sociology, economics, and politics, without stopping to realize that white America has "done everything they can think of to prevent you from knowing" these things. The chapter closes with the narrator only partially aware of the darker side of the Brotherhood. He needs the money and the job, and he wants to speak. So he is willing to put up with their strange behavior, at least for a time. Later in the novel he will begin to see their real intent.

THE STORY, continued

THE NOVEL

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