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.
I definitely noted the parallel between the coal being painted white by the factory's paint, and our narrator leaving the factory in white overalls (covering his black self).
ReplyDeleteDo you think there's something interesting in how Liberty Paints's Optic White paint's goal is to cover non-white with white so much that the original color (and identity?) is lost, yet presumably this transitional period in the novel is when our narrator begins unlearning his aspiration towards (white-like) respectability? If the Liberty Paints factory in any way represents the system that whitewashes and eliminates blackness from culture/history/?, why is our narrator supposedly going through that transition in reverse? Is our narrator finally "waking up" to the system, that ends in his radically counter-culture lifestyle, anonymously tapping electricity in a hidden room in Harlem?
You bring up a really good question Vincente. How come the narrator doesn't leave more "white-washed" than when he first joined the company. He definitely leaves changed, but not in the way that we would expect him to. It's important to note that he does leave with a new identity.
DeleteI wrote my post about a simliar topic, and I liked the examples that you used to show the changes in the narrator. I like how you pointed out how the hospital scene is almost like a rebirth - or a scene in which his character completely changes from what it was in the beginning.
ReplyDeleteThere's a crucial difference between change and *progress*: yes, the narrator's identity seems to keep morphing (sometimes abruptly) as the narrative unfolds, but do we see these as changes he should be making? Do we see him moving *toward* something like a viable identity that will express his individuality and not be solely defined by other people's interests? Or is he just shifting from one to the other, with no appreciable progress?
ReplyDeleteWhen you note the emergence of a questioning, critical voice, it does seem like progress. And in this light, the Brotherhood giving him a formal outlet for that voice might definitely seem like some steps in the right direction: when he's walking around Harlem getting recognized by everyone (under his new name and identity), does this seem like a good thing? Is he more self-actualized than when he was proudly eating a yam in the street, not caring who's looking (even though no one *is* looking)?