Symbols of Black Stereotypes

Some of our recent Invisible Man readings have included descriptions of a few interesting symbols Ellison uses to represent black stereotypes and how they affect the narrator. The first one that came to mind was the image of the “Jolly N Coin Bank” in chapter 15. This bank represents the stereotypical views of how humiliating it is that a slave must try desperately to be rewarded by their master with a trivial reward. The prison chain given to the narrator by Brother Tarp can also be seen as a symbol of racism, since it was the chain that held Brother Tarp back from being free. Even though Tarp is no longer a slave in the south, his limp is a constant reminder of his past. The Sambo doll is another racist symbol in the book based off of the Sambo slave, who acts lazy according to white stereotypes. The fact that this doll is a puppet controlled by strings also conveys the idea that white people can control and manipulate all the actions made by a black person. In the book, when Clifton gives his spiel he says “he lives upon the sunshine of your lordly smile,” (432) which is another indication of how the doll is meant to illustrate the power white people have over black people.

What is particularly interesting about these symbols is how the narrator continues to carry them with him. In the case of the bank, the narrator leaves Mary’s home with the shattered bank in his briefcase. He keeps trying to get rid of the bank, but he fails each time. Even to where we are now in the book, the narrator carries both Tarp’s chain and the Sambo doll in his pocket. These symbols all illustrate how black stereotypes weigh the narrator down and hold him back from ridding society of these attitudes. These are the first ones I thought of, although I’m sure there are many more throughout the book.

Changes in the Narrator

In class we’ve been talking a lot about how in Invisible Man, there seems to be a theme of how the narrator’s identity is constantly changing. Towards the beginning he’s set on going to college and becoming Bledsoe’s assistant. He’s also completely blind to the reality of the world, in that he acts the way he does towards white people because he thinks it’s right, not because he is being fake to get along like his grandfather did. Even after Bledsoe sends him away from college to get a job, he hopes to return. After denying his grandfather, Bledsoe, and the vets advice that the college life isn’t for him, the narrator has the same reaction towards Emerson. That is, until Emerson provides him with physical evidence that this dream is shattered.

This marks a drastic change in the narrator. After getting a job at Liberty Paints, he seems much more cynical about his situation and less respectful of white people, at least in his mind. For instance, when he is working for Kimbro, he has thoughts of quitting or telling him to go to hell.

Liberty Paints as a whole is a good example of how the book conveys a change needed in the narrator. In class the past couple of days, we talked about how everything about the company gives off a weird vibe, and when the narrator entered a completely new city when he went to work. The way the paint was described as “the purest white that can be found” and “that’ll cover just about anything” (202) was a little off-putting. Also, the fact that Kimbro was upset when there was the slightest gray tinge on the samples the narrator made was strange and made me think that the whole allegory within Liberty Paints is that white people are superior to black people. Another example that supports this is when the narrator is working with Brockway, who says “Our white is so white you can paint a chunk coal and you’d have to crack it open with a sledge hammer to prove it wasn’t white clear through” (217)! This makes it seem even more like the goal of Liberty Paints it to make black people (represented by the coal) whitewashed into behaving like white people.

After the these chapters, the book goes through another section that shows a “rebirth” of the narrator. Another thing we focused on it class is how many of the descriptions in the hospital chapter can be seen as metaphors for the narrator being born again. The narrator is trapped in a glass box (his womb), hears a woman screaming (as women do when they give birth), has a sort of chord attached to his stomach (like an umbilical chord), and the doctors continually ask him who his mother is, to the point where the narrator questions “a machine my mother” (240)? When he leaves, they even have him wearing white overalls. This chapter in the book is another part where it seems like others are trying to change the narrator, recreating him into a different person.

Our discussions of this in class made me question why this theme is something that we keep seeing throughout the book, and I wonder if we’ll keep seeing signs that the narrator needs to change as we continue to read.