"invisible man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: 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."

^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: 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.

^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: 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.

^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: 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.