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.