Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison

THE STORY, continued

CHAPTER 15

The narrator spends his last night at Mary's and wakes up early the next morning to the sound of someone above him banging on the steam pipes. It is cold and there is no heat. The chorus of banging picks up, as others awaken, annoyed by the banging. The narrator's head is splitting from the drinking the night before, and he starts furiously on the pipes himself. Out of control, he grabs a cast-iron bank, shaped in the form of a "very black red-lipped and wide-mouthed Negro" and starts banging away. The head breaks, and the bank scatters its coins across the room. Mary hears him from outside and asks what is going on. He quickly sweeps the coins and broken metal into a pile, wraps them in a newspaper, and stuffs it in his overcoat pocket for later disposal.

NOTE: THE SYMBOLISM OF THE BANK
You will want to pay close attention to the bank, if you are interested in following Ellison's symbols, because the broken bank stays with the narrator from now until the end of the novel. The bank, like the Sambo dolls that Tod Clifton ends up selling, seems to represent a part of the black past that the narrator would like to hide. Its wide-grinning mouth eats coins. A coin is placed in the hand, and when a lever is thrown, the hand flips the coin into the grinning mouth. Does this suggest what "grinning Negroes" were willing to do for money from white masters? Remember the battle royal scene in Chapter 1 where the black boys scrambled for money on the electrified carpet? Is the narrator selling out to the Brotherhood for money? Keep this rich, complex symbol in mind as you follow it through.

The narrator has coffee with Mary, who seems unshakeably serene in the midst of all the noise. The narrator pulls out a hundred dollar bill and hands it to her in payment of his back rent, and she is overjoyed. She is proud she will be able to pay the bills everyone has been bothering her about. Did he win the money playing the numbers, she asks? Yes, he answers, relieved to find a simple explanation. He is not supposed to let her know he is leaving, nor that he is involved with the Brotherhood. She is so pleased about the money she seems totally unconcerned about what he's doing; so he is able to get his prized briefcase and leave. As he goes out he hears Mary singing the blues, as she always does. It seems to reassure her and bring her peace of mind.

A few blocks down the street he tries to throw the broken bank into a garbage can, but a woman stops him, yelling at him that she doesn't want any trash from "field niggers" in her garbage can. So he is forced to pluck it out. A few more blocks down the street, he just leaves it in the snow, hoping no one will notice, but someone picks it up and returns it to him, accusing him of being some kind of criminal making an illegal "drop." So he finally gives up and puts it in his briefcase, figuring that he will dispose of it later. Don't forget it's there, because it will reappear before the novel's end. The bank, as the previous note suggests, is a part of himself that he just can't get rid of.

The chapter ends with his arrival at his new home, a clean three-room apartment in a neutral, racially mixed neighborhood on the upper East Side. It is a neat, orderly, well-maintained world, just like the organization he has joined. He spends the remainder of the day in the apartment studying the pamphlets the Brotherhood has given him and preparing to make his first speech at a rally in Harlem that evening.

CHAPTER 16

Chapter 16 is an important and exciting chapter, consisting largely of the narrator's first speech for the Brotherhood and the reaction of the Brothers to it. The chapter is shot through with images of sight and blindness. Look for them as you read, and ask yourself what they are suggesting.

The narrator is driven by Brother Jack and some others to an arena in Harlem that is usually used for boxing matches. He remembers his father telling him how a famous boxer had been beaten blind in a fight in that arena, and the narrator notices the boxer's picture on the wall. He is nervous in his new blue suit, wondering how he will do and whether the people will like him. He paces up and down in the locker room, goes outside, then comes back in again, anxious to get started. Then Brother Jack gives the signal and they all march in, as the crowd sings "John Brown's body lies a mold'ring in the grave." The narrator's eyes are blinded by the spotlights as they move toward the stage.

The speeches begin. Each speaker touches on a different aspect of the problem. Then comes the narrator's turn. He is the one the crowd has been waiting for, the hero of the eviction protest, the young man who spoke and disappeared and then was found again by the Brotherhood.

At first he doesn't know what to do, but, as in the eviction speech, he follows instinct. He goes back to what he knows, the tradition of southern political oratory that he grew up with. "They think we're blind," he tells his audience. "Think about it, they've dispossessed us each of one eye from the day we're born.... We're a nation of one-eyed mice." Playing on the metaphor of blindness, he asks the members of his audience to join together and help one another to see better rather than using the one eye that each of them has to attack others. "Let's reclaim our sight; let's combine and spread our vision."

Moved by his own words and the response of the crowd, he becomes more personal. "I feel, I feel suddenly that I have become more human," he tells the crowd almost in a whisper. There is at that moment a special bond between the speaker and his audience, a bond that is personal and deeply emotional. He finishes, and the crowd goes wild. The brothers file from the stage, and Brother Jack is excited. But the reaction of the other brothers is not so positive. The narrator is stunned. The speech has been the greatest moment of his life, and the brothers are telling him that it was "a most unsatisfactory beginning."

Two of the brothers in particular- one identified as the man with the pipe and the other named Brother Wrestrum (whom we will meet again)- say that the speech is backward and reactionary. They tell the narrator and the other brothers that such emotional tactics are not in keeping with the scientific discipline of the Brotherhood. The people must be taught rationally to understand their role as part of the process of history. Emotional rabble-rousers like the narrator are simply of no use to the Brotherhood's design.

Brother Jack, who has listened carefully to both praise and criticism, finds a middle road. The new brother is to be trained. He will not be allowed to speak again until he is properly indoctrinated into the Brotherhood's philosophy and methods. He will be sent to Brother Hambro. The group agrees that the narrator is to begin training with Brother Hambro the next morning, and so he goes home, exhausted, disappointed that the brothers did not approve, but happy about his relationship with the people. As he lies in bed, trying to figure out what has happened, he wonders what he meant by the phrase "more human." Was it something he learned in college? He remembers an English teacher named Woolridge who taught him Joyce and Yeats and O'Casey, those great writers of the Irish Renaissance, and he remembers something Woolridge said: "Stephen's problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face.... We create the race by creating ourselves...."

NOTE: "THE UNCREATED FEATURES OF HIS FACE"
Almost every critic who writes about Invisible Man discusses this phrase, which has become one of the most widely quoted lines from the novel. Stephen Dedalus, the hero of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, leaves Ireland at the end of the novel to begin his task as an artist of creating "the uncreated conscience of my race." Ellison plays on Joyce's phrase by changing "conscience" to "features" and "race" to "face." Ellison is an individualist who believes that the job of each individual is to create himself, to become genuinely and honestly a single individual. Stephen wants to become a spokesman for the Irish people, his race, but Ellison does not want to be thought of just as a black writer. His hero is an individual in the act of creating himself, in the act of becoming a person, a "more human" person.

CHAPTER 17

There is a passage of four months. The narrator has been studying with Hambro, "a tall, friendly man, a lawyer and the Brotherhood's chief theoretician." Hambro is a hard teacher, but he is fair, and the narrator feels, as the chapter opens, that he is ready for whatever the Brotherhood wants him to do. He has attended meetings regularly all over the city, he has come to know the Brotherhood ideology well, and he has learned the discipline that is involved in working for the Brotherhood.

On the day the action of the chapter begins, Brother Jack calls the narrator and drives him to Harlem, where they talk in a bar. He informs the narrator that he has been appointed chief spokesman of the Harlem district. The narrator is overjoyed. His dreams have been fulfilled. In this way he can work directly with his people. Brother Jack takes him to the office, introduces him to Brother Tarp, with whom he will be working, and reminds him to be there the next morning for a full committee meeting.

The meeting begins promptly at nine, and all the committee members are there except for Brother Tod Clifton. As Brother Jack begins the meeting by announcing the narrator's appointment as chief spokesman, Clifton comes in, a bandage on his face covering a wound he received fighting one of Ras the Exhorter's men. He is late because he had to go to the doctor.

Who is Ras the Exhorter? He is a short, stout black man who has been organizing Harlem on a racist basis, preaching the gospel of black nationalism, and sending his men to fight any organization, like the Brotherhood, that advocates cooperation between blacks and whites. The conflict between the Brotherhood (represented by the narrator and Tod Clifton) and Ras the Exhorter serves as one of the central themes of the last third of the novel.

Tod Clifton and the narrator quickly become friends. Tod is an extremely handsome young black man who seems to carry in his genetic makeup the best features of both his African and Anglo-Saxon ancestry. He is a hard worker who welcomes the narrator as an ally. The narrator will organize the community leaders behind the Brotherhood's policy of fighting against evictions, and Tod will organize his youth groups to protect the narrator and other neighborhood speakers from being attacked on the street. Tod is excited about the plan for organizing Harlem. "It'll be bigger than anything since Garvey," he says.

NOTE: MARCUS GARVEY
Marcus Garvey (1887-1940) was a native of Jamaica who came to New York in 1916 and started a black nationalist movement, urging American blacks to return to Africa. Garvey had an estimated two million followers during the 1920s. He was convicted of mail fraud in 1925 and returned to Jamaica in 1927 after serving time in prison. Some of Ras the Exhorter's ideas are very similar to those of Garvey, though the Exhorter is in no way an attempt by Ellison to depict Marcus Garvey.

Tod and the narrator take to the streets and are forced almost immediately into a confrontation with Ras the Exhorter's men, who interrupt the narrator's first speech that evening. The narrator tackles one of Ras' men, and Tod goes after Ras himself. The narrator beats his man, then goes to help Tod, whom he finds in an alley lying on his back with Ras, knife in hand, standing over him. Helpless, the narrator is forced to watch and to listen.

Ras is a fascinating figure, and in this scene you may find him both appealing and repulsive at the same time. He is crazy and violent, but to many readers what he says makes sense. You will have to weigh the arguments on both sides carefully as you think about Ras. He spares Tod's life because he loves him, he admires him, and he wants him to come over to his side. He wants the narrator, too. He says that Tod is first of all an African and that in Africa a man as handsome and intelligent as Tod would be king. He stands over Tod with his knife, essentially arguing with him, trying to persuade him to come over to the Black Nationalist cause. These white men will betray you, Ras tells Tod. They will get rid of you when it suits their purpose, so don't trust them. He accuses Tod and the narrator of joining the Brotherhood so they can enjoy white women. He pleads with them to be part of black unity, to break entirely with any organization run by white men. What do you think of these arguments? They are very similar to those used by black militants in the 1960s, most notably the Black Muslims and the Black Panthers. The Communists did, in effect, betray the black members of the party who worked so hard during the 1930s, and this might suggest that Ras is right. What is Ellison supporting? Is it possible to know at this point in the novel? Keep these questions in mind as you continue reading.

Chapter 17 ends with a brief scene the next morning in the narrator's office. Brother Tarp comes in and hangs a picture of Frederick Douglass on the wall facing the narrator's desk. Douglass is Tarp's hero, and he wants the narrator to see him as he works.

NOTE: FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Born a slave named Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey in 1817, this famous fighter for black rights ran away from his owner in 1838, ending up in Massachusetts, where he changed his name to Frederick Douglass. A brilliant speaker and writer, he devoted his life to work for the abolition of slavery and the elimination of racial discrimination. His autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845; revised 1881), is one of the great pieces of black American literature and became an inspiration to generations of blacks fighting for equality in America. Ellison's use of a variety of famous black leaders as possible models for the narrator is important. Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and Douglass represent three different paths for blacks to follow. Brother Tarp would like the narrator to imitate Frederick Douglass, and the narrator at the end of Chapter 17 finds the idea very exciting.

CHAPTER 18

Time passes, how much you don't know, but it seems to be at least a couple of months. The Brotherhood's work in Harlem is extraordinarily successful. The narrator's speeches and parades, the organization of the community's ministers and politicians, the enthusiasm of the people for the issue of evictions all combine to increase membership in the Brotherhood at a dizzying rate and make the narrator famous.

At the beginning of Chapter 18 the narrator receives an anonymous note telling him to slow down. The note says that the Brotherhood doesn't want him to be so famous. He will be cut down if he isn't careful. He is both angry and frightened. Who could have written it? It came in an envelope with no postage stamp. Does that mean it was an inside job? Who do you think sent the letter? Look for clues as you read the remainder of the chapter.

The narrator asks Brother Tarp how the members feel about him, and Tarp reminds him that his stress on interracial cooperation has led to the creation of a poster entitled "After the Struggle: The Rainbow of America's Future." Youth members have mounted the posters in subways, and people have begun hanging them in their homes. Tarp is impressed with the success of the narrator's work and reassures him that the people are behind him.

NOTE: TARP'S LINK OF CHAIN
As a symbol of his support for the narrator, Brother Tarp pulls from his pocket a worn metal link from a chain, and he gives it to the narrator as a token. Brother Tarp filed that chain from his own leg after nineteen years on the chain gang when, like Frederick Douglass, he headed north to start a new life. Because of those nineteen years given him as punishment for standing up and saying "no" to a white man, he still drags his foot even though there's nothing physically wrong with it. Old now and ready to retire, he wants to pass on that spirit of justice and integrity to the narrator. So he gives him that link of chain as a good-luck piece and as a reminder. The word "link" has at least two senses- literally, one of a group of loops making up a chain; figuratively, something that ties together past and present. The chain links the narrator to his own past, which he has forgotten, a past symbolized by Tarp's experience and by his grandfather, whom Tarp reminds him of. Taking the link makes the narrator remember his own childhood and hear the songs his parents and grandparents used to sing. He is reassured that he is doing the right thing. He likes the symbolism of the chain.

Later in the morning Brother Wrestrum comes into the office. He is disturbed by the link of chain sitting on the narrator's desk. He sees the link as an advertisement of the racial nature of the narrator's cause, a symbol that the white brothers might find offensive. He doesn't want to stress the cause of Harlem, of black people, but the cause of the Brotherhood. He wants all brothers to wear emblems that will identify them so that members of the Brotherhood won't end up fighting with each other. Wrestrum seems uneasy. Is he jealous of the narrator's success? Is he the one who wrote the letter?

While Wrestrum is in the office, the phone rings. It is the editor of a magazine, who wants to do an article on the narrator. The narrator says that Tod Clifton would be a much better person to interview, but Wrestrum insists that the narrator sit for the interview. Reluctantly, the narrator agrees. Two weeks later he will wish that he hadn't.

Two weeks after the meeting with Wrestrum, the narrator finds himself downtown at Brotherhood headquarters. With absolutely no warning, he is accused by Brother Wrestrum of being an individualist who is exploiting the Brotherhood for his own personal gain. Wrestrum accuses the narrator of trying to become a dictator in Harlem and of having had the article in the magazine published to glorify himself rather than the Brotherhood. The narrator replies that he hasn't even seen the article, and besides doesn't Brother Wrestrum know that he tried to have the interview done with Tod Clifton? Wrestrum himself was the one who urged the narrator to do it. What is going on? The narrator and Wrestrum argue and call each other names. The narrator is asked to leave the room, the charges are discussed, and he is brought back.

The decision of the committee is that, while the narrator has been found innocent on the charge of the magazine article, it will be best for the "good of the organization" that the narrator be removed from Harlem. He is given the choice of remaining inactive until further notice or of lecturing downtown on the Woman Question. This is all done seriously. Nobody laughs. The narrator is appalled. It's like a crazy dream, a nightmare, a strange joke. They can't be serious, but they are. Are you as surprised as the narrator? Why, when he is obviously doing so well, is he sent downtown to lecture on the Woman Question, something he knows nothing about? The narrator accepts the assignment because it is the only way he can continue to be active, but the chapter ends with him sneaking out of Harlem, afraid to tell his friends what has happened. His identity has been changed again, and again by someone else's choice.

CHAPTER 19

Chapter 19 is a transitional chapter, like Chapters 7 and 12. Invisible Man seems to be constructed in four major movements, each centering around a crisis. The crisis that begins the final movement comes in Chapter 20, when the narrator returns to Harlem to try to find Tod Clifton, who has disappeared. But before he returns to Harlem, he spends an evening with a white woman. That is the main action of Chapter 19.

As you read this chapter, ask yourself what Ellison is up to. Some readers think the chapter reads like something out of a torrid romance. Handsome black man speaks to a bunch of unsatisfied women about the "Woman Question," and what the women are really interested in is biology, not ideology. As the narrator tells the story of his seduction by the unnamed woman in red, whose husband appears to come home while she is in bed with him, you must wonder how seriously you are supposed to take all this. The narrator is very naive. When the woman goes off to change into something more comfortable and reappears in a red hostess gown, the narrator does not seem to get the message. He has come to her apartment for "coffee" and discussion after his lecture on the Woman Question, and she asks him, "Perhaps you'd prefer wine or milk instead of coffee?" The idea of milk turns him off, but he misses the oddness of the question.

Her change of clothes, her apartment with its life-size painting of a pink Renoir nude, her talk, her movement, her excitement over the "primitive" quality of the narrator, all mark the woman as one of Ellison's objects of satire. When one critic asked him if his depiction of the narrator's relationship with white women wasn't a weakness in the novel, Ellison chided the critic for taking both this scene and Chapter 24 too seriously. Perhaps you ought to be guided by Ellison's own judgment here and accept this sequence as a piece of tongue-in-cheek satire, based on the traditional myth that white women desire black men. Do you enjoy the humor of this chapter, or do you think that neither the narrator nor the scarlet woman is a very believable character in this scene?

Whether the scene is parody, satire, or serious writing, the appearance of the husband scares the narrator to death. He puts on his clothes, leaves, and vows to keep "the biological and ideological" apart in the future. He fears that the woman will tell the Brotherhood about what he's done, but no one ever says anything. So he goes on speaking on the Woman Question until one evening the phone rings and he's called to an emergency meeting. Tod Clifton has disappeared, and the narrator is needed to return to Harlem immediately.

CHAPTER 20

When asked about the style of Invisible Man (see the section Style for details), Ellison commented that the style moved from realism to expressionism to surrealism. As you read the last six chapters, beginning with Chapter 20, think about what surrealism is and why the style might be described as surrealistic. Something changes in the narrator during Chapter 20, and he begins to move inward, seeing the world outside from a new perspective. What happens in Chapter 20 shakes him profoundly and makes him feel that the world outside is unreal and that he is just awakening from a deep sleep to see the world as it truly is for the first time.

The whole chapter has an air of nightmare about it. The narrator returns to Harlem in search of Tod Clifton, but everything has changed. He goes to a bar called Barrelhouse's Jolly Dollar, where he used to meet one of his favorite contacts, Brother Maceo. When he gets there, not only is Maceo gone but the men there resent being called "brother." It's as if the whole movement has vanished since he was sent downtown. He goes to his old office in search of Brother Tarp, but Tarp has disappeared, and the portrait of Frederick Douglass has been taken down. "Returning to the district was like returning to a city of the dead."

The next morning he finds a number of the members and asks them about Tod Clifton, but no one knows anything about Tod's disappearance. He goes back downtown to attend a committee meeting and discovers that it not only has started without him but that he hasn't been invited. The entire Harlem program has fallen apart and he has been sent to do a job with no help, no instructions, and no official program. Why? Unable to figure out what to do, he wanders over to Fifth Avenue and buys a new pair of summer shoes. Then he walks down Forty-third Street toward Sixth Avenue where he encounters a strange and remarkable sight.

A crowd is gathered in front of a piece of cardboard on which "a grinning doll of orange-and- black tissue paper with thin flat cardboard disks forming its head and feet" is dancing. Something behind the cardboard is making the doll dance, and that "something" is saying:

Shake it up! Shake it up!
He's Sambo, the dancing doll, ladies and gentlemen....
He'll keep you entertained. He'll make you weep sweet
Tears from laughing.
Shake him, shake him, you cannot break him....

NOTE: SAMBO THE DANCING DOLL
Both the name and the movements of the doll are important. Like the grinning bank that the narrator finds in his room at Mary Rambo's, the Sambo doll is one of the central symbols of the novel. "Sambo," like "Uncle Tom," is a term used by blacks to describe other blacks who allow themselves to be used and manipulated by whites. If an "Uncle Tom" is a black man who lets himself be used as a servant by whites, a "Sambo" is a black man who plays the role of comedian or mindless entertainer. He is a black who grins and laughs and pretends that he doesn't mind what is being done to him. He is the professional funny man, the song-and-dance man, who entertains whites and seems not to mind the hurt and pain that blacks must suffer, in part because of his own failure to do anything. Thus the grinning Sambo bank at Mary's and the dancing Sambo doll symbolize the very type of black man that both the Brotherhood and Ras the Exhorter seem to be fighting against.

The sight of the dancing doll and the comic spiel of the manipulator of the doll attract the narrator's attention, but what stuns him is his discovery of who the street merchant is. It is Tod Clifton. The narrator cannot believe his eyes. Why? Why would Tod give up the Brotherhood and "plunge outside history" (to use Tod's own phrase) to become a cheap entertainer, a seller of Sambo dolls?

The narrator comes to no answer. Remember that this is a first-person narration and that the narrator was not present in Harlem when Tod made his decision. Like the narrator, you can never know- you can only guess. One guess is that Tod felt betrayed by the Brotherhood when he discovered that it had changed its emphasis from local programs such as that in Harlem to more international issues. This is precisely what the Communist party did around 1940 and 1941, thus disillusioning American blacks who were working with it. Perhaps Tod simply despaired of achieving anything and gave up. Or perhaps he gave up because he thought the narrator had betrayed the cause and he was disillusioned by the narrator's disappearance. Which is the most likely explanation as far as you are concerned?

Whatever the reason, the narrator can't look at him or bring himself to talk to him. Then Tod's lookout warns him to move: The police are coming, and Tod has no license to sell these dolls. Tod and the crowd vanish around the corner, leaving the narrator to think about what has happened. The narrator picks up a doll that has been left on the sidewalk and puts it in his pocket with Brother Tarp's chain link (an interesting combination). Then he goes off after Tod. He sees him again on Forty-second Street, being led away by a cop. The cop pushes him along, and suddenly Tod whirls and uppercuts the policeman. The policeman goes down, draws his gun, and shoots Ted. The narrator, across the street, is frozen in horror.

The narrator tries to reach Tod but is stopped by another policeman, who insults him, calling him "Junior." "I'm his friend," the narrator says, but it is no use. They will not let him through. In a few moments Tod is dead. He has become what the name "Tod" means in German. The narrator answers the policeman's questions about Tod and then wanders toward the subway after the body is taken away in a police wagon.

He is in a state of shock. Nothing makes sense. Why should Tod deliberately court his own death like that? Tod knew better. He was street-wise and knew what white policemen did to any black who resisted. Did he want to die? Again, these questions are not answered. They are only food for your thought and the thought of the narrator, who tries to puzzle out what has happened as he waits for a train to take him back to Harlem.

A change comes over him. He starts to notice details that had escaped him before. He sees three boys dressed up in summer suits and felt hats, and he realizes that he has never seen boys like this before. He has never thought of these boys or of women like Mary Rambo or younger women who walked the streets in "dark exotic-colored stockings." He has been so busy with historical issues he has not really noticed people as individuals. Who speaks for such people, and who will speak for Tod? These are the questions he asks himself as the chapter ends. He realizes that he is finally waking up to reality. "I'd been asleep, dreaming," he thinks. But he is making a start. The death of Tod Clifton has stirred him to see people as people for the first time. The last major movement of the novel has begun.

CHAPTER 21

The narrator returns to Harlem and continues to reflect on Tod Clifton's death. He goes over his own actions and wonders if he isn't in some way responsible. He asks himself how to restore the integrity of Tod Clifton, and he comes to the conclusion that it must be done through his funeral. They will have a massive funeral for Tod, and his death will become a means of reuniting the community. He gathers together the district members and organizes his campaign of protest against the brutality that destroyed Tod Clifton. Signs reading BROTHER TOD CLIFTON / OUR HOPE SHOT DOWN are posted throughout the community.

The funeral is held outdoors in Mount Morris Park to attract the largest possible crowd, and people come from all over the city. Rich and poor, brothers and sisters, and nonmembers of the Brotherhood alike want to mourn for a man everybody loved. Bands play muted funeral marches, and an old man begins singing the familiar hymn, "There's Many a Thousand Gone." Another man joins in on the euphonium, a brass instrument like the tuba, and then the crowd, black and white alike, begins to sing. It is a special moment in the novel, one you will savor. The narrator himself is deeply moved: "Something deep had shaken the crowd, and the old man and the man with the horn had done it. They had touched upon something deeper than protest, or religion...." Music, the music of the Negro spiritual tradition going back to slavery, speaks to the heart in a way that the scientific theory of the Brotherhood never can. It touches and humanizes the narrator and gives him a sense of unity with all people, not just with those who are part of the movement.

In this mood, the narrator gives Tod Clifton's funeral oration, much as Mark Antony in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar speaks for Caesar in that play. Just as Antony says he comes to bury Caesar, not to praise him, the narrator keeps saying that Tod Clifton is dead and that there is nothing he can say that will make any difference. His speech is simple and honest and moving: It comes to no political conclusions. He speaks not as a brother to a mass of people but as an individual to individuals. He mourns for the unnecessary death of a man he loved, and he tells the people that Tod Clifton stands for all of them. "He's in the box and we're in there with him, and when I've told you this you can go. It's dark in this box and it's crowded. It has a cracked ceiling and a clogged toilet in the hall." The people know. The narrator does not have to tell them: Tod Clifton is any black person who was shot down because he could not stand it in the box any longer.

The funeral ends. The crowd, moved to deep feeling but not to any specific action, goes home, and the narrator feels again the tension and knows that "something had to be done before it simmered away in the heat."

CHAPTER 22

This is an extremely important chapter. The action that began in Chapter 20 with the death of Tod Clifton comes to a climax as the narrator confronts the committee after the funeral. For the first time since he joined the Brotherhood, he has acted on his own volition. He has done something not because someone told him to, but because he chose to. He knows from the moment he arrives at the meeting that he is going to be attacked, but he maintains his integrity before them. He acted, he tells the committee, on "my personal responsibility." "Your what?" Brother Jack asks. "My personal responsibility," he says again. Immediately we are reminded of Chapter 1 and the battle royal scene where he was making his speech and was reprimanded for suggesting that blacks try to gain social equality. Again he is being attacked by white men for presuming to act on his own initiative, especially by Brother Tobitt, who is exactly what his name suggests, a "two-bit" character, who thinks he's superior to other white men because he has a black wife.

The narrator stands up under the attacks of Brother Tobitt and Brother Jack. He believes he has done right, even though Jack calls Tod Clifton a Brutus (that is, a betrayer of Caesar, or the Brotherhood). To the narrator, Tod's defection from the Brotherhood is not important. What is important is that he was shot because he was black. Brother Jack is not interested in the problems of the black man any more. Clifton was a traitor to the Brotherhood. Therefore, Brother Jack reasons, he is not to be praised by Brotherhood members. The narrator has reasoned it out differently, because he has thought for himself. "You were not hired to think," Brother Jack says firmly. And the narrator knows where he stands. This is the truth about the Brotherhood. They don't want his mind, only his mindless obedience to their policies.

The tension grows as the argument between the narrator and Brother Jack becomes more and more fierce. Brother Jack tells the narrator that demonstrations are no longer effective and that they should be discontinued. The narrator wants to know who gives Brother Jack the right to speak for black people. "Who are you, anyway," he asks, "the great white father?" Then he drives the point home: "Wouldn't it be better if they called you Marse Jack?"

At this, the usually cool, rational Jack loses his poise. He leaps to his feet as if to attack the narrator, and suddenly an object like a marble drops to the table. Jack grabs it and throws it into his water glass. Brother Jack has only one good eye. The left one is a glass eye.

NOTE: BROTHER JACK'S GLASS EYE
It is worth pausing over this fascinating piece of symbolism. Throughout the novel Ellison has been working with images of sight and blindness. The narrator up to now hasn't really seen what has been going on around him. In his first speech for the Brotherhood he spoke of black people as "one-eyed mice," the other eye having been put out by white men. Jack is one-eyed also, the other eye having been closed by the Brotherhood. He cannot see anything except what the Brotherhood permits him to see. He has literally sacrificed his eye for the Brotherhood. In this chapter, when the narrator finally sees how limited Jack's vision is, he expands his own vision. He, as it were, opens his eyes for the first time, realizing that Jack has never seen him, never really acknowledged his existence as a human being.

The death of Tod Clifton, the funeral, and the argument with the committee have changed the narrator. As the chapter ends, he concludes, "After tonight I wouldn't ever look the same, or feel the same." His identity is changed once more, evolving into something more like a true self.

CHAPTER 23

The narrator is sent to Brother Hambro for instructions about the new policies of the Brotherhood. On his way downtown he runs into Ras the Exhorter, the last person he wants to see. Ras attacks him for doing nothing about the shooting and demands to know what the Brotherhood has to say for itself. The narrator has no answer, and he leaves, followed by two of Ras' men who attempt to beat him up in front of a movie theater. The movie doorman intervenes, and the narrator escapes temporarily. His problem is how to keep Ras' men from harassing him, now that the Brotherhood organization has fallen apart.

All at once he notices three men in "natty cream-colored summer suits" and wearing dark glasses. An idea comes to him. He goes into a drugstore and buys himself some dark glasses. Immediately everything changes. The world looks green through the glasses, and a woman comes up to him and calls him "Rinehart." He answers, and she realizes from his voice that he isn't Rinehart, but the mistake has been made. He has learned from the woman that Rinehart usually wears a hat, so he goes to a hat shop and buys a wide-brimmed white hat to go with his glasses, and as if by magic a couple of men on the street call him Rinehart. He even walks by Ras the Exhorter, who has now changed his name to the DESTROYER, and is not recognized. He decides to test the disguise even further by going to the Jolly Dollar, and even Barrelhouse, the Bartender, and Brother Maceo mistake him for Rinehart. He ends up- as Rinehart- having a fight with Maceo and getting thrown out of the bar.

Who is this Rinehart, anyway? Out on the street a woman comes up to him and asks him for the day's last number. A police car stops and asks him for the usual police payoff. Rinehart seems to be some kind of a con man, a numbers runner, a gambler. A beautiful girl comes up to him and starts to seduce him until she realizes he isn't Rinehart. Apparently Rinehart is quite a lover, too. The narrator runs off and finds himself in front of a store that has been converted into a church. The minister's name is the Rev. B. P. Rinehart, and a member of the congregation comes up to the narrator on the street, mistaking him for this minister.

NOTE: WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN?
You may wish to consult The Characters section under "Rinehart" for some analysis of this strange and elusive figure. Much can be said about him because everything Ellison does here with Rinehart is open to interpretation. Is he real? Is he one person? Is he several people? You don't know. You do know that he is, for Ellison, a symbol of life in the real world. He is a man who can live in the chaos of reality and survive by simply adapting to it and taking advantage of it. Rinehart represents another possibility for the narrator- a strategy for coping with reality that from here to the end of the novel he will call "Rinehartism." We might define it as a kind of cynical opportunism. It's another identity that a man can adopt, and Rinehart, with his magical hat and glasses, seems to be protected against the hurt of the world. He is in control.

Whatever Rinehart represents, the narrator is not quite ready to deal with it. "I caught a brief glimpse of the possibilities posed by Rinehart's multiple personalities and turned away. It was too vast and confusing to contemplate." The narrator wants some order and structure in his life. That is why he joined the Brotherhood in the first place. So he puts away the hat and glasses and goes to see Hambro. Hambro is honest and brutal. When the narrator asks him why his district is being allowed to fall apart, Hambro answers simply, "We are making temporary alliances with other political groups and the interests of one group of brothers must be sacrificed to that of the whole." The philosophy of the Brotherhood is purely utilitarian: Do what is best for the whole. If some suffer, that is unfortunate but necessary. Individuals are not important. They are merely part of the whole. The narrator argues with Hambro, calling this view of individuals just another form of Rinehartism. Of course Hambro doesn't know who Rinehart is. The narrator begins to see the situation even more clearly than he had in the previous chapter. "Hambro looked as though I were not there." To Hambro, the narrator is an invisible man. "Well, I was," he says, "and yet I was invisible, that was the fundamental contradiction. I was and yet I was unseen."

The narrator leaves Hambro's and goes home to think through the day's experiences. He is exhausted. He has been through the funeral, the grueling fight with the committee, the experience with Ras the Exhorter, the strange disguise as Rinehart, and the discussion with Brother Hambro. His mind is trying to sort it all out. He realizes that he was always invisible- to Norton, to Emerson, to Bledsoe, to Jack, to everyone. Only now he knows it. Before he had been nothing because he was nothing to himself. Now, though he is invisible to others, he is a self.

With this insight he comes to a decision. At last he understands the meaning of the event with which Chapter 1 began, the deathbed advice of his grandfather. His grandfather had said, "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."

His grandfather's words have haunted him all his life, but until now they only made him feel uncomfortable. He has never either understood or believed in what his grandfather had said. Now he does. And he decides to follow that advice. He will stay in the Brotherhood, but he will be a spy in their midst, yessing them to death and destruction while he pretends to be a loyal worker. He will pretend to be an Uncle Tom, but in reality he will seek to undermine them. He plans to begin the next day by using their women as a source of information about them. He has a new purpose.

CHAPTER 24

The chapter opens on the day following the crisis with the Brotherhood, and the narrator puts his plan of "yessing them to death" into effect right away. He openly lies to the brothers at Headquarters about what is going on in Harlem, simply telling them what they want to hear and being pleasant and outwardly cooperative while getting on with his plan of undermining the organization. He decides that he needs a woman as a source of information and thinks of Emma, Brother Jack's mistress, whom he met at the Chthonian on the first night. He decides against her because she might be loyal to Jack and picks instead a woman named Sybil, whom he invites to his apartment the next night.

NOTE: SYBIL
The name "Sybil," like nearly all the names in the novel, has symbolic meaning. A sibyl was a woman in Greek times who served as an oracle or prophet for one of the gods. The sibyls would make prophetic utterances when under divine inspiration. Inspiration could be easily confused with drunkenness. Ellison's Sybil seems like a complete failure as a prophetess. The narrator gets her drunk and asks for information about the Brotherhood, and this Sybil knows nothing. She only wants the narrator's body.

The evening with Sibyl becomes a series of ludicrous jokes. Like the woman in red from Chapter 19, Sybil has the illusion that the narrator is some sort of superman. She expects him to be a combination of the boxing champion Joe Louis and the noted actor and singer Paul Robeson. She wants to be raped by him in order to fulfill her white woman's fantasy of being violated by a black man. Apparently Sybil has always heard that white women want black men. So she wants what she assumes every other white woman wants, but what she wants is a myth. It doesn't exist. And to emphasize the point, Ellison has the narrator grab her lipstick and write on her belly, "SYBIL, YOU WERE RAPED BY SANTA CLAUS. SURPRISE." The myth of the black stud is on the same level as that of Santa Claus. It's a child's fantasy to be outgrown.

Sybil never outgrows it. She falls into a drunken sleep and wakes up thinking that something wonderful has happened to her while she was sleeping. She continues to think the narrator is perfectly wonderful, calling him "boo'ful" in her drunken stupor. The phone rings, jarring the narrator back to reality. It is someone from the district. All hell has broken loose in Harlem, and the narrator is needed at Morningside Heights.

He struggles to get Sybil dressed, grabs his briefcase, puts Sybil in a taxi, and starts walking toward Harlem. When he gets to 110th Street, he finds Sybil "waiting beneath a street lamp, waving." She runs away, then falls in the street, totally unable to control herself. He gets another taxi and orders the driver to take her straight home. Then he flags down a bus and rides it to 125th Street and Riverside Drive. He can't seem to do anything right, for he has even taken the wrong bus, and now he will have to walk across 125th Street to Harlem.

CHAPTER 25

When he reaches Morningside Heights, the riot is in full force. Four men are running toward him pushing a safe, and he is caught with them in police fire. He falls to the pavement, hit by a bullet, and feels blood on his face. It is only a superficial wound, though. A slug has creased his head.

He finds himself in a nightmare world, unable to take care of himself. Then, for no reason, a man named Scofield helps him, and the narrator finds himself following Scofield and Dupre, the leader of a group of local blacks. They are planning something. They go to a hardware store, get flashlights, and then buckets which they fill with coal oil. Dupre seems to have organized everything. They take the buckets to a tenement house and clear the house of women and children. Scofield tells the narrator, "This is the place where most of us live." Nothing in the narrator's experience has prepared him for this. He is amazed. These people need no Brotherhood. No leaders. They are taking their lives into their own hands. The narrator thinks, "They organized it and carried it through alone; the decision is their own and their own action."

The people spread the oil, light it, and the building goes up in flames. Suddenly in the street, someone recognizes the narrator and calls him by his Brotherhood name. He runs, afraid that Ras' men will find him, and ends up in another rain of pistol fire. Dupre and Scofield have guns and are fighting it out with the police. But, the narrator suddenly sees that this battle is pure suicide- a few pistols against the police arsenal. Is this what the Brotherhood wanted, to have blacks fighting one another and the police in a riot which will ultimately mean self-destruction?

The narrator runs again in the nightmare of the streets littered with broken glass. There are looters everywhere, taking what they can, and as the narrator runs he sees a white body hanging from a lamp post. Have they lynched a white woman? No, it is another macabre joke. It is a dummy, a store mannequin.

Again, the narrator runs, and this time straight into Ras the Destroyer. Ras, surrounded by his men and carrying a shield and spear, is riding toward him on a huge black horse. The narrator searches for his dark glasses, his Rinehart disguise, but they have broken in his briefcase. So he must face Ras. Ras flings his spear at him and misses, hitting one of the mannequins behind him. The narrator grabs the spear and speaks, trying to hold back the tide of destruction. "They want this to happen," he says, trying to explain that he now sees through the Brotherhood. And even as he speaks, he knows it is too late. Ras and his men want to hang the narrator as a symbol. They would like to lynch him as whites lynched blacks. But the narrator is not ready to die. "I knew that it was better to live out one's own absurdity," he says, "than to die for that of others, whether for Ras' or Jack's."

NOTE: "TO LIVE OUT ONE'S OWN ABSURDITY."
Invisible Man was published in 1952, at the height of the influence of French existentialist writing in the United States. The concept of absurdity, central to existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, certainly influenced Ellison strongly. In this passage, the narrator comes to what might be called an existential affirmation. He realizes that life is absurd, that the organizations to which he has given himself are meaningless, but that the individual can live, can affirm his own existence in the face of that absurdity. We can live and choose to be an authentic self whether the universe has meaning or not. You might wish to read some existentialist literature, such as Camus' The Stranger, Sartre's No Exit and Nausea, and explore its influence on this novel, especially on this chapter and the Prologue and Epilogue.

Spurred by the will to live, he throws the spear back at Ras and fights his way through the crowd, using his briefcase and Tarp's leg chain as weapons. He is through with everything. All he wants is to get away, to find his way back to Mary's and be taken care of. He wants to say, "...we're all black folks together," but it's too late and the violence has spread everywhere out of control. He runs until exhausted, then stops to rest behind a hedge, where he hears people talking about Ras and his final battle with the police: Ras charging the cops like some crazy knight of old, fighting with spear and shield.

He gets up to run again, to find Jack and Tobitt and Wrestrum, when he sees two young white men in civilian clothes. Cops, he thinks, until he sees one holding a baseball bat. They want his briefcase, and he takes off down the street running. Suddenly he falls through an open manhole into what seems to be a coal cellar. The whites can't see him because he's a black man lying in the dark on a black heap of coal. He is now literally invisible, and they clamp the manhole cover back on, leaving him there, where he stays in a kind of tomb, a kind of living death, to sleep until morning.

The novel has come full circle. This is the underground home that the narrator refers to in the Prologue. This is where he has remained and written his novel since the night of the riot, slowly converting his dark into light, not knowing for a long time whether it was night or day. That process of lighting his way out of both the literal and figurative darkness of the underground cave begins at the conclusion of this chapter with the narrator's first act after he wakes up. He has no light to see his way out, and so "I realized that to light my way out I would have to burn every paper in the brief case." Notice what he burns and in what order: first, the high school diploma, then Clifton's doll, then the anonymous letter written by Brother Jack, then the slip of paper on which Jack had written his Brotherhood name. These are his white identities, all of which must be burned away, destroyed, before he can "light his way" out of the darkness of the cave.

NOTE: THE BRIEFCASE AND ITS CONTENTS
The briefcase is the only object the narrator takes into the cave from his former life. He burns all the papers, but still in the briefcase is Mary's broken bank and its coins along with Tarp's leg chain. These two objects are part of his black heritage, a part that will always be with him. Perhaps these cannot or should not be left behind. What do you think? What about the briefcase itself? What might it represent?

The chapter ends with an agonizing dream in which the narrator is castrated by Emerson, Jack, Bledsoe, Norton and Ras, who laugh at him as he realizes that this is the price of freedom. This is what it has cost him to see reality. Now he is free of illusion, but he cannot go back to the real world. He must stay in the cave. "Here, at least, I could try to think things out in peace, or, if not in peace, in quiet. I would take up residence underground. The end was in the beginning."

EPILOGUE

The Prologue and Epilogue are harder to deal with than the rest of the book, because in the sense of "story," nothing happens. In one sense, the story line is at an end. But in an important sense the novel isn't over, if you think of things happening inside people's minds as well as externally. The most important things that happen to individuals are sometimes the interior things, the changes that take place within. That is what happens in the Epilogue. The story in Invisible Man is summed up by the narrator when he says, in the Epilogue's first paragraph, "I'm an invisible man and it placed me in a hole- or showed me the hole I was in...." That's an effective metaphor. The hole he falls in at the end of Chapter 25 is where his life led him. But people can change. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, "The snake that does not shed its skin will perish." During the course of writing the novel (the story of Invisible Man), the narrator learns that he must shed his figurative skin. He must give up his old identities; then, after he has had time to get used to who he really is, he must stop hibernating. Just as the bear comes out of his cave in the spring, just as the snake returns to the world after he has grown his new skin, the narrator must give up his invisibility and rejoin the world: "The hibernation is over. I must shake off the old skin and come up for breath," he says- using three metaphors at once.

But, you might ask, what does coming up and rejoining the world mean? He tells you. He will become involved in the world with his new knowledge. Even if it hurts, he will be part of the world because "even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play." Staying in the cave is like dying. If you stay too long, then you can never come up. So he will, he says, as the novel ends, come up and play a role in a world he now understands is better because it is diversified. "America is woven of many strands," he reminds you, and "our fate is to become one, and yet many." That is why Ras is wrong and Brother Jack is wrong and Bledsoe is wrong and Emerson and Norton are wrong, because they deny the individual his right to be one and be different and still be part of the many. That is Ellison's final thought, and that is one thing that the narrator learns through his journey underground. That is what he will attempt to teach others. "Perhaps," the novel ends, "on the lower frequencies I speak for you." And he has, indeed, spoken for many in the last thirty years.

A STEP BEYOND

THE STORY

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