"invisible man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)
The story starts when the narrator graduates from high school in a southern town. The leading white citizens invite him to give his graduation speech at a "smoker" in the ballroom of the local hotel. He arrives to find himself part of a "battle royal" in which local black boys are forced to fight one another blindfolded for the entertainment of the drunken whites. After the battle, the blacks are further humiliated by having to crawl on an electrified carpet to pick up coins. Finally, the hero is allowed to give his speech and is rewarded with a leather briefcase and a scholarship to the state college for blacks.
The narrator is a good student at college and is sufficiently well thought of to be allowed to drive distinguished white visitors around the campus and community. Near the end of his junior year he drives one of the trustees, a Mr. Norton, out into the country. They arrive by accident at the cabin of a black sharecropper named Jim Trueblood, who has caused a terrible scandal by committing incest with his daughter. Trueblood tells his story to Norton who is so overwhelmed that he nearly faints. In order to revive Norton, the narrator takes him for a drink to a nearby bar and house of prostitution called the Golden Day. A group of veterans who are patients at the local mental hospital arrive at the same time, and a wild brawl ensues during which Mr. Norton passes out. He is carried upstairs to one of the prostitute's rooms and revived by a veteran who was once a physician.
The horrified narrator finally returns Norton to the college, but the damage has been done. The young man is called into the president's office and dismissed from school. The president, Dr. Bledsoe, gives him letters of introduction to a number of the school's trustees in New York, and the narrator boards a bus the following day, hoping that the letters will help him succeed in the white world.
To his surprise the letters do not seem to help when he arrives in Harlem. No one offers him a job. Finally, young Mr. Emerson, the son of one of the trustees, explains why: The letters were not letters of recommendation at all but instructions not to help the boy, to keep him away from any further association with the college. The stunned narrator now has nowhere to turn, and so takes a job at the Liberty Paint Company at the recommendation of young Mr. Emerson. The experience is a bizarre one. He is sent to work with an old black man named Lucius Brockway. Brockway, a black man, is the real creator of the Optic White paint that Liberty is so proud of, but the naive young narrator doesn't understand the irony of the situation.
Later, when he fails to pay attention to Brockway's instructions, he is knocked out in an explosion. When he wakes up, he finds himself in a large glass and metal box in the factory hospital. He seems to be the object of some sort of psychological experiment. He is subjected to electric shock treatment, questioned, given a new name by a man in a white coat, and released. Dazed, he returns to Harlem like a newborn infant, unable to care for himself.
The confused protagonist is taken in by a compassionate black woman named Mary Rambo, who nurses him back to health. But what is he to do? Winter is coming and the money given him in compensation by the factory has all but run out. The narrator goes out into the icy streets and has the most important experience of his life. He sees an old black couple being evicted and spontaneously gets up before the gathered crowd and stirs the people to action. He has found a new identity--as a spokesman for blacks--but the police arrive and he is forced to flee across the rooftops, followed by a white man who introduces himself as Brother Jack. Brother Jack would like the narrator to work for his organization, the Brotherhood, as a speaker for the Harlem district. The narrator hesitates, then accepts the offer. He is given a new name and is moved from Harlem to a new location, where he will study the literature of the Brotherhood.
The next evening the narrator is taken to Harlem to begin his career as a speaker for the Brotherhood. He and several others sit on a platform in a large arena, and he is the last to speak. When he speaks, he electrifies the audience with his emotional power, but the Brotherhood is not pleased. They consider his style primitive and backward, and so he is barred from further speeches until he has been trained by Brother Hambro in the methods and teachings of the Brotherhood.
Four months later the narrator is made chief spokesman of the Harlem district. His committee, which includes Brother Tobitt, Brother Tarp, and the narrator's favorite, Brother Tod Clifton, is concerned about regaining the support of the community from Ras the Exhorter, a wild black-nationalist rabble-rouser who has drawn black people into a war with whites. The narrator and his new friend Clifton engage in a street fight with Ras, a fight that foreshadows the final battle in the novel between the Brotherhood and supporters of the black nationalist. Nothing is concluded, but at the same time Ras is unable to stop the Brotherhood, under the narrator's leadership, from making great progress in Harlem.
Brother Tarp, as a token of his support for the narrator's leadership, gives him a link of leg chain. But there are many in the Brotherhood who do not like the narrator. He is too successful and moving too fast. At a meeting of the committee, the narrator is removed from a leadership role in Harlem and ordered to lecture downtown on the Woman Question. He is stunned, but he obeys the Brotherhood and gives the lecture as ordered, whereupon a white woman, more interested in his sexuality as a black man than in the Woman Question, seduces him in her apartment after the lecture. His lectures downtown continue until he is suddenly and surprisingly returned to Harlem after the unexpected disappearance of Brother Tod Clifton.
The narrator returns to Harlem, hoping to reorganize the neighborhood, but things have deteriorated since he was sent downtown. He searches for Tod Clifton and finds him, pathetically selling Black Sambo dolls near the New York Public Library. A police officer nabs Clifton for illegal peddling and shoots him when he resists arrest. Suddenly the narrator, who has witnessed this, finds himself plunged into an historical event. A huge funeral is arranged for Clifton in Harlem, and the narrator speaks at the occasion, but his speech is very different from his earlier speeches. He can no longer rouse the crowd to action. He returns to Brotherhood headquarters and is severely criticized by Brother Jack for having acted without authority.
The angry narrator is frustrated at his inability to accomplish anything constructive. He puts on a pair of sunglasses to disguise himself and suddenly finds that he has taken on another new identity, that of Rinehart, a swindler. Not even Ras the Exhorter, now Ras the Destroyer, seems to recognize the narrator in this disguise. Concerned about the growing strength of Ras and his men, the narrator goes for advice to Brother Hambro's. Here he is told that international policies have temporarily changed directives. Harlem is no longer a priority for the Brotherhood. The narrator is astonished. Again he has been betrayed by an organization he trusted. He finally begins to see what a fool he has been and understands that he has, to white people, been invisible. He follows his grandfather's advice and starts "yessing them to death," meanwhile secretly planning his own strategy.
As a part of his revenge he spends a drunken evening with Sybil, the wife of one of the Brotherhood members, hoping to obtain useful information from her. But she is more interested in his body than in politics. A telephone call interrupts them. There is a huge riot in the district, and the narrator is needed. He hurries back to Harlem to find total chaos. Looters are everywhere, and Ras and his troops are out in force. Ras, on a black horse and dressed as an Ethiopian chieftain, is armed with spear and shield. The narrator narrowly escapes being killed by Ras. He dives into a manhole to avoid being mugged by a group of white thugs, and falls asleep.
^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: THE NARRATOR
You begin with a problem. The novel's central character has no name. Some readers refer to him as the Invisible Man, others call him the narrator. Some regard him as the protagonist or the hero. You may call him by any of these titles, because he has all these roles.
"I am an invisible man," he tells you in the first sentence of the novel. When he calls himself invisible, he means that other people don't see him, that no one recognizes him as a person, as an individual. A helpful way to understand the Invisible Man as a character is to use the ideas of the noted twentieth-century Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber. Buber distinguishes between I-Thou relationships and I-It relationships. When we love someone, there is an I-Thou relationship, one between two individuals who truly care for one another as persons. In an I-It relationship we use others as things. We like people for what we can get out of them.
If you apply this idea to Ellison's central character, you may conclude that he is invisible because people always see him as an "It," never as a "Thou." He is used by the college officials and the wealthy white trustees in the first half of the novel and by the leaders of the Brotherhood in the second half. Once he is no longer useful to these people, he is discarded like trash. It is particularly interesting to note that, when people want to use him, they give him a name. He is named in Chapter 11 by the doctors at the factory hospital before being released. He is renamed by the Brotherhood in Chapter 14. Notice that you are never told these names. The. only name he is ever called is "Rinehart," and that is in Chapter 23 when he puts on a pair of dark glasses, and, later, a hat, to disguise himself from Ras the Exhorter's men. Throughout the chapter, he is mistaken for a variety of "Rineharts"--Rinehart, the gambler; Rinehart, the lover; Reverend Rinehart, the minister. Eventually the protagonist discards the glasses, but it is significant that it is his choice, not someone else's. When the main events of the novel are over, he chooses to stay underground, to remain literally invisible--out of circulation--until he has thought through who he is and who he wants to be rather than accepting other people's definitions of him. At the end he decides to come out of his hole and rejoin society. Maybe he will still be invisible. That is an interesting point for you to consider. Ellison certainly seems ambiguous about it in the Epilogue. But the narrator is a different person from the young man who experienced the adventures in the main body of the novel.
The Invisible Man is not only the chief actor in the novel--the protagonist--he is also its narrator. The story is told in the first person, and for that reason you have to be careful about the way you interpret it. In this guide's section on Point of View you will find additional material on the problems of interpreting first-person narratives. For now, you need to be aware of the way in which first-person narration affects your analysis of the Invisible Man as a character. The Invisible Man is what is known as a naive narrator. Throughout most of the novel, he is young, inexperienced, and gullible. You cannot take what he says at face value because there are many, many occasions when he misses the irony of a situation or the true import of people's words and actions. Sometimes he simply misinterprets things. So he is not only a naive narrator, he is an unreliable narrator in the sense that you cannot trust his version of the story to be entirely accurate. He tells it as he sees it, but he doesn't always see it very well.
But, before you judge the narrator too quickly, be careful. He is not the same person at the end of the novel that he is at the beginning. He is a character who grows. The German word Bildungsroman is often used to describe the novel of education, the story of a person's growth to maturity. Invisible Man is a Bildungsroman, and the narrator changes a good deal during the course of the story. You will follow his development step by step in The Story section of this guide. For now, you should be aware that the protagonist is a developing rather than a static character. The only tricky thing to watch out for is that the Prologue represents a stage of development after the events of Chapters 1 to 25. Thus, if you are tracing the narrator's development, the order would be Chapters 1 to 25, Prologue, Epilogue. Between the Prologue and the Epilogue the narrator is actually writing the novel, and in the Epilogue he is trying to understand the meaning of what he's just done.
One final point: The narrator is an Afro-American. Part of the reason he's invisible is that Ellison feels white people do not see black people. Much of what he suffers comes at the hands of white people and those blacks who work for white people. From this point of view the narrator may be interpreted as a symbol for the black person in America. And if you are black or Hispanic, or a member of another minority that suffers from prejudice, you may identify especially with this character, who seems to be treated so unjustly at the hands of prejudiced men and women. But Ralph Ellison, when asked about the narrator, frequently emphasized the point that his hero was universal--he was any person searching for identity in the chaos and complexity of contemporary America.
Invisible Man is, in a sense, a one-character novel. The narrator himself is the only figure whose life you are concerned with from the beginning to the end of the novel. Other people enter the novel, live in it for a few chapters as they influence the narrator, then vanish. We will look briefly at the most important of these figures in the order that they appear in the book. Each of these characters is also discussed in some detail in the appropriate chapters of The Story section. You should consult those chapters for more complete treatment. The minor figures are considered briefly in the Notes in The Story section.
^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: MR. NORTON (CHAPTER 2)
Mr. Norton (his name suggests northern) is the first figure to influence the narrator's destiny. He is a white-haired, red-faced multimillionaire from Boston who serves on the black college's Board of Trustees. He looks and acts like Santa Claus, seeing himself as a good-natured benefactor of black people. Norton tells the narrator that he was one of the college's founders and that his success as a man depends on the success of the college's students. He seems to mean by this that black people ought to try and rise up from the effects of slavery and illiteracy in the way prescribed by the white power structure.
The narrator drives Mr. Norton out to the country, where they stop at the home of a black sharecropper named James Trueblood, who has committed incest with his daughter. Norton seems both horrified and fascinated by Trueblood's story and is so shocked by hearing it that he must be taken to a bar named the Golden Day for a drink to revive him. Here he is injured in a scuffle, eventually revived, and finally returned to the college, but not before the damage has been done--Norton has been educated to the realities of black life in the South. He has seen not what Dr. Bledsoe, the college president, wants him to see but what black people like Jim Trueblood and the veterans at the Golden Day really think and feel about themselves and whites. In the process he is exposed as a vulnerable old man who is himself near death and needs care. Who cares for him? A prostitute and a supposedly crazy black veteran. Has the narrator intentionally taken Mr. Norton on a journey to self-knowledge?
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