History Repeats Itself

Invisible Man can be thought of as a coming-of-age novel, in many ways. Ellison chronicles the narrator's life from the shamelessly humble, naive boy in the rural south to the cynical, anti-authoritarian man living in an abandoned basement at the edge of Harlem. Each subsequent step in his life removes him farther and farther from where he came from, and his outlook on life changes with each new disappointment. Why, then, do events that are so similar happen over and over again? The narrator fights a battle royal in a boxing ring in the first chapter, then gives a speech in the fifteenth chapter in a boxing ring, and then gets into another chaotic brawl in the next chapter. He scrambles for coins after the fight, and then sees a racist antique that gobbles coins for doing tricks much later in the novel. He sees a then-unknown man named Ras giving a speech on the street, wondering if it would incite a riot, and then himself later gives a speech on the street that leads to a riot! The book is packed with these deja-vu moments, and while some of them are explicitly acknowledged, others fly farther under the radar, and leave the reader with the feeling that time repeats itself with similar circumstances over and over, and the narrator must grow from these permutations or follow them indefinitely.

The first big event that looms in the book's consciousness is the battle royal. Right in the first chapter, the narrator is forced to fight with ten other boys before giving the speech he was supposed to give on racial humility. He stumbles blindfolded through a smoky boxing ring, randomly punching and trying to avoid being hit before scrambling for coins on the floor. By the time he gives his speech, he is literally swallowing blood, a powerful metaphor for his own acceptance of the brutal racism of the South. When he much later joins the brotherhood, he hopes for a life free of such things, or at least free from the poverty that he is living in when he takes the job. However, Ellison apparently does not think so highly of the brotherhood. After the narrator joins, he becomes aware of a black Americana bank in his room, which grins and does a trick to put coins in its mouth. The connection is not explicitly drawn, but the narrator feels instantly ashamed of and angry at the "self-mocking image," one which the reader instantly compares to the coin-grabbing frenzy of the opening chapter. The bank even grins grotesquely, reminiscent of the narrator's forced smile as he swallowed down blood to give a speech on racial humility. The comparison is clear: on some symbolic, subconscious level, Ellison is implying that the narrator is still doing cheap tricks for coins.

Right after this, the narrator gives his debut speech with the Brotherhood, which is, surprisingly enough, in an old boxing ring. The narrator even pointedly compares this to the opening chapter, but does not make a judgment on the similarity. He also notices a picture of a boxer who was blinded in a rigged boxing match, and then died unable to receive compensation. When the narrator goes up to speak, the lights shine and he too is blinded, just like the boxer, and, more darkly, just like in the opening chapter. This time, however, he speaks not what the Brotherhood wants him to speak about, but instead rhetoric about dispossession and blindness, a topic that welled up from within himself. It appears the narrator has grown.

This growth is soon eclipsed, however. In the very next chapter, the narrator goes to rally at an eviction, and along comes Ras and a gang of his followers. The scene almost instantly devolves into a brawl, with people blindly fighting each other. A comparison is drawn again to the battle royal in the first chapter, and the comparison is later strengthened by Ras' speech. He warns them that they are black men fighting against black men, which the white man has made them do. This is almost exactly what happened in the first chapter, and Ellison seems to be implying again that the Brotherhood is again using the narrator, and making him fight with other men for their own gain, just like the white men did at the battle royal. Ras, however, urges the narrator to realize this and pursue his own cause, and it seems that the speech has a strong effect on the narrator. Whether he will escape the cycle or continue to be trapped in a white man's world remains to be seen.

This constant re-imagining and repetition of uncannily similar events seems to show the reader that the narrator is still caught within the confines of the white man's world. It does not seem as if he is doomed to repeat them forever, but the fact that similar things keep happening to him implies that he must learn something from the flow of time if he wishes to not endlessly be caught in a cycle of brawls and blindness. It is up to the reader to decide critically how far they think he is from escaping, if he ever will. 

Melting Clocks

Throughout Invisible Man, one immediately apparent aspect of the novel is its continued commitment to depicting events in not strictly realistic terms. It's not as if the chain of events that is shown in the novel is literally impossible, just somewhat unlikely. From the very beginning of the novel, where the protagonist reveals he lives in the basement of an apartment building surrounded by 1369 glowing lightbulbs, we are thrust into a world we don't entirely understand, one that is close to ours but is just slightly off-kilter. In addition to single instances in the novel seeming strange, there is also a thread of interconnectivity that runs through the narrator's entire life, much more than would occur in real life or even in a realistic novel. For example, the narrator is told early in the book by Mr. Norton to look to Emerson for self-realization. Then, much later, the narrator seeks a job from a Mr. Emerson, who gives him a job with Liberty...paint company. It is this weird, almost dreamlike filter that the novel presents the world in that allows the narrator and the reader to analyze the serious issues presented in the novel, such as racism.

A prime example of the completely surreal nature of Invisible Man comes very early in the book. In chapter one, the narrator is invited to give a speech on humility and strength through obedience to a group of white men. However, when he gets there, he is first required to box with other young black men in a boxing arena. As he is brought out, he sees a smoky room full of screaming white men, and then a naked, beautiful blonde woman with a tattoo of an American flag on her navel is brought out. This riles up the boxers and the audience, and as the woman crowdsurfs her way out of the ring, the boxers are blindfolded and begin fighting. This is clearly not something that would happen in real life, and vague symbolism lies scattered throughout the section, such as the American flag tattoo, or the electrified coins the young men dive for that end up being brass advertisements, but this dreamlike episode the narrator goes through allows the reader to think critically about what Ellison is really trying to say. It is obvious that he isn't implying there are secret Battle Royales that plague the South, but at the same time there is an implicit judgment here about how the black community is made to fight each other, and is forced to do tricks to receive petty cash (an idea that pops up much, much later when the narrator encounters a similarly surreal black Americana coin bank). It is only because the event is so ridiculous that we are forced to think of it as symbolic, not as a realist attempt at telling a story.

Back to the Roots

When I first came across the album Undun, by The Roots, I had not ever listened to them before. The only reason I decided to listen to the album at all was that I heard it had been enormously well received, and I wanted to see what all of the fuss about. I instantly realized when I started listening that it was of value musically, but it took me to the end of the album before I realized that the album merited discussion in the context of African American literature. Technically, it is a hip-hop album, not a book or print work, but it still dealt with many of the themes I had noticed reading Native Son.

The album needs some context to be understood as a full story. It chronicles (backwards) the life of Redford Stevens, a fiction hustler who rises from the streets to become rich, famous, and eventually die. Of this last fact, the listener is made instantly clear: the album opens with the sound of a heartbeat monitor, as the narrator looks back on his life and wonders if he will be remembered. The inevitability of death presented here resonates with the strong element of naturalism in Native Son, in that no matter what happens to the characters inside, the outcome is always death. 

As the album continues from this dark start, the narrator is presented as living large, with money and drugs, reminiscent of the idealized gangsta lifestyle, but Redford is anything except at peace. Instead, he is portrayed as always anxious and unsure of his lifestyle: "I'd give it all for peace of mind, for Heaven's sake/ My heart's so heavy that the ropes that hold my casket break." Redford is a man that cannot live freely, and feels burdened by the choices he has made. This is a much harsher, more incisive view of the gang lifestyle than is presented as the mainstream ideal, and this perspective is not only more interesting as it is different, but makes for a much more engaging story. Redford not a "thug," he is a person that is constantly evaluating his own life choices, and this is a character that is much more complex and realistic. 

Where do all of these decisions that Redford has made come from? Farther in the album, as we back deeper and deeper through his life on the street, we come to his experiences as a lowly street-level drug dealer, and here we can see the motivation to live the life that he led. in "Tip the Scales," Redford asserts that he believes crime and eventually prison or death are the only options that he has: "The scales of justice ain't equally weighed out/ only two ways out, digging tunnels or digging graves out." The implication is that the system of justice is skewed, and that the only way for him to make anything out of himself is crime. This is a message that feels at home in Native Son, as Bigger Thomas felt somewhat similarly in that he planned on robbing a white man's store and then killed a white woman because it is the only thing he could do. This goes beyond naturalism, however. The story also works on an almost Greek tragedy level: Redford has an inevitability to his death that fate has determined, and he constantly struggles in his life with the decision to commit crime that he has made. This album presents this story fantastically, and I recommend it to anyone looking for music to listen to.