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

Brother Wrestrum sees the leg iron on the narrator's desk and complains about it. He is a "pure brother," and he wants no reminders of the black man's past in the office. He wants all Brotherhood members to wear buttons or pins so that they can be instantly recognized. Wrestrum is not working for black freedom, but for the Brotherhood, and he is perfectly willing to turn against any black member who does not follow Brotherhood discipline to the letter. It seems as if Wrestrum is a kind of paid spy for the higher-ups like Brother Jack. After all, it is Brother Wrestrum who turns the narrator in to the board, charging him with selfish opportunism and causing him to be sent downtown to lecture on the Woman Question. Is Brother Wrestrum acting on his own initiative when he accuses the narrator in the middle of Chapter 18, or is he acting on orders? You don't know, but in either case there is something consistently sneaky and dishonest about Brother Wrestrum, whose name sounds unmistakably like "rest room." In Chapter 24 the narrator refers to him as "that outhouse Wrestrum." Need anything more be said?

^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: RAS THE EXHORTER (CHAPTER 17)

Ras the Exhorter enters the novel with Tod Clifton in Chapter 17 but survives Tod's death to become the most dominant figure in the book's closing chapters. Ras the Exhorter, who becomes Ras the Destroyer during the final race riot, is a black nationalist who has organized the Harlem community along racial lines. The name "Ras" clearly suggests "race." The name may also come from "Ra," the name of the Egyptian sun-god, who is pictured as a man with a hawk's head. Literally, the name comes from the Amharic word Ras, which means "prince" or "king." The Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie was Ras Tafari before he became emperor, and the Jamaica-based religion Rastafarianism believes that its members derive their ancestry from Ethiopia and, if traced all the way back, to Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Rastafarian ideas were well known in Harlem during Ellison's time. Ras is inspiring because he has a message that blacks want to listen to, the unity of race. On the other hand, he is terrifying, because his methods are violent and lead finally to the terrible reality of black fighting against black in senseless mutual destruction. When the Brotherhood is no longer interested in Harlem, they turn it over to Ras, who uses the pretext of Tod Clifton's death to start a race riot. What Ellison seems to be suggesting through Ras is that the ultimate implications of Ras' philosophy are totally self-destructive. Ras and the Brotherhood appear to be equally wrong choices for different reasons.

One of the unusual things about Ellison's portrait of Ras is that it is not based on any particular figure. Ellison was asked if he had Marcus Garvey in mind, because Garvey was a black nationalist from Jamaica who spoke with a Caribbean accent similar to the one Ras uses in Invisible Man. Ellison said that Ras came from his imagination. Rather than being historical, the figure of Ras is prophetic. Within fifteen years after Invisible Man was published, figures like Ras sprang up all over America. Some, like Malcolm X, became Black Muslims. Others, like Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, called themselves Black Panthers and carried weapons, as they said, to defend themselves against white violence. America's cities--Watts (Los Angeles), Detroit, Newark, Chicago-were rocked with race riots, and many blacks turned away from any kind of dialog with whites. Today the figure of Ras, and the riot at the end of the novel which he engenders and prolongs, seem to prophesy what America would go through in the 1960s when the calmer voices of integration gave way to the radical shouts of the Black Muslims and Pan-African movements. Ras is a powerful and frightening figure who may symbolize some of Ellison's worst fears.

^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: RINEHART (CHAPTER 23)

Rinehart is a student's dream. Almost anything you say about him is likely to be true. About Rinehart there are far more questions than answers, and you should have an exciting time exploring this mysterious figure who never appears.

You know that someone or perhaps several people named Rinehart exist, because the narrator is mistaken for Rinehart a number of times in Chapter 23 after he puts on a pair of dark glasses and a white hat to disguise himself from Ras the Exhorter's men. The glasses and the hat are magical. "They see the hat, not me. There is magic in it. It hides me right in front of their eyes..." the narrator thinks to himself. Not only does it hide him, it gives him a new identity, another new identity--that of a man named Rinehart who, it seems, is a numbers runner, a lover, a storefront evangelist, and a hipster. But can one man be all these things at once? Could there be at least two or three Rineharts? Is Rinehart a character at all? Is he really more a symbol, a type, than an individual?

The narrator thinks about the meaning of Rinehart's name. "Could he himself be both rind and heart? What is real anyway?" Later he says, "So I'd accept it, I'd explore it, rine and heart." If we are trying to discover the meaning of Rinehart as a symbol, we need to look at both the words "rind" and "rine." "Rind" means a thick outer skin, like the rind of an orange. It means a kind of toughness that enables one to survive. "Rine" is really street talk for "rind." A man with a lot of "rine" is a tough dude, one who can survive in the chaos and confusion of the unstructured world of the street. Ellison said in an interview that "Rinehart is my name for the personification of chaos. He is also intended to represent America and change. He has lived so long with chaos that he knows how to manipulate it."

Rinehart is a con man, a manipulator. He lives in the world, but he doesn't really do anything for the world except use it. The identity of Rinehart may be a temporary sanctuary for the narrator, but it is another identity he must reject if he is to find himself as a person. Eventually he discards the glasses and the hat and takes to his hole to think out his true identity. You will have a fascinating time following the glasses and the hat through Chapters 23 to 25 and exploring what they suggest symbolically about the elusive and ever-present Mr. Rinehart, and the narrator's adoption of his lifestyle. Early in Chapter 25 the glasses are broken, and the narrator must face Ras the Destroyer without the protection of Rinehart. What might that suggest?


^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: SETTING

Setting is always important in Invisible Man, because Ellison is both a realistic writer and a symbolist. He puts events in real settings, but these settings always stand for something beyond themselves.

The largest and most significant element in setting is the contrast between South and North. Chapters 1 to 6 take place in the South, Chapters 8 to 25 in the North, with Chapter 7 as a transition. In Ellison's words, the narrator "leaves the South and goes North; this, as you will notice in reading Negro folktales, is always the road to freedom." Thus one major pattern of the novel is a move from the restricting bonds of the South, symbolized by the rigid distinctions between black and white, to the greater flexibility of the North as symbolized by life in Harlem. But the existence of that pattern should not lead you to view North and South simply as symbols for restriction and freedom. In Ellison's popular short story, "King of the Bingo Game," the anonymous narrator finds himself in the cold, unfriendly North missing the warmth and easygoing quality of southern life. Do you find, as you read Invisible Man, that North and South are mixed symbols, representing a variety of things? Is the South both restrictive and friendly, the North freer yet more impersonal?

There are several significant settings within each geographic area. The settings in Chapters 1 to 6 include the hotel ballroom where the battle royal takes place (Chapter 1), Jim Trueblood's farm (Chapter 2), the Golden Day (Chapter 3) and the college (Chapters 4 to 6). Each of these settings allows you to see black life in the South from a different perspective. Chapter 1 represents blacks in their most demeaning situation--on public display in the white world. Chapters 2 and 3 show blacks acting more freely in more natural settings, but these are settings outlawed for the college boys. The college boys are being educated on a tree-lined campus with brick buildings. It is a neat and orderly world, a world in which blacks are restricted to the kind of behavior that suits those black leaders who would please wealthy whites. The campus is an Uncle Tom world, a world of blacks trying to act like whites.

To grow, the narrator must stop idealizing this world and its leaders. He must accept the freer and yet more dangerous world symbolized by New York. New York is a microcosm of the North. Though not rigidly segregated like the South, it is divided into predominantly black Harlem and predominantly white downtown. Downtown is where the Brotherhood has its main office. It is where the narrator visits white "brothers and sisters." It is where Tod Clifton is killed by a white policeman. It is significant that when the narrator joins the Brotherhood, he leaves his rooms at Mary Rambo's boarding house in Harlem to take more expensive rooms in a white part of town. Harlem is the center of black life and culture, the place where Ellison himself lived for a number of years after leaving Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The black must know and understand Harlem in order to find his identity. By rejecting Harlem, the narrator has rejected his own blackness. He has spent most of the novel trying to become white.

The final significant setting is the underground cave of the Prologue and Epilogue. Here, the narrator is in a "border area," not associated with either black or white. Here he has retreated into himself to think out his identity, to come to some self-understanding. Here, alone, apart from those who try to force identity on him, he is able to arrive at some genuine self-knowledge. The cave is a place of contemplation, a place to grow a new skin and be protected from the harsh realities of the outside world until he is strong enough to go outside. The novel ends, significantly, with the narrator's decision to leave the cave, to go up and out into the real world again, a world of both blacks and whites.

^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: STYLE

Invisible Man is a stylistic performance of the highest order, a delight and a constant series of surprises to anyone who loves words. That's one view. The other is that it is a confusing mass of shifting styles that only serves to keep the reader from knowing what's going on. Therefore, take this section of the study guide as a warning: Invisible Man is not an easy novel to read, and if you want to get the maximum pleasure and understanding from Ellison's dazzling use of language, you will have to work at it.

Ellison's first stylistic device is word play. He loves puns, rhymes, slogans, and paradoxes. "I yam what I am!" cries the narrator, after buying a hot buttered yam from a street vendor in Chapter 13. "If It's Optic White, It's the Right White" is a slogan for the Liberty Paint Factory coined by the black Lucius Brockway. It reminds the narrator of the old southern expression, "If you're white, you're right." "All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit, and mother-wit," says Peter Wheatstraw, a street blues singer in Harlem. What all these expressions and many others have in common is that they are not only funny and clever, they also embody folk wisdom that the narrator needs to hear and understand.

Ellison also has a fine ear for all kinds of speech--especially varieties of black folk dialect. All the black folk characters--Jim Trueblood, Burnside the Vet, Brockway, Wheatstraw, Mary Rambo, Brother Tarp, and at the end the two black revolutionaries Scofield and Dupree--speak in their own varieties of black folk dialect and exhibit a kind of knowledge that the more educated "white" characters seem to lack, a "street" knowledge that has passed from South to North, from generation to generation, and needs to be remembered.

Ellison's stylistic range is enormous. In Chapter 2 he writes a description of the college in the style of the poet T. S. Eliot. In Chapter 4 he writes a sermon modeled on the classic oratory of black preachers throughout the South in the early twentieth century. Influenced by a range of writers from Eliot and Joyce to Dostoevsky and Richard Wright, he can write in whatever style suits his purpose at the time. When asked about his changing styles in the novel, he said, "In the South, when he [the narrator] was trying to fit into a traditional pattern and where his sense of certainty had not yet been challenged, I felt a more naturalistic treatment was adequate.... As the hero passes from the South to the North, from the relatively stable to the swiftly changing, his sense of certainty is lost and the style becomes expressionistic. Later on during his fall from grace in the Brotherhood it becomes somewhat surrealistic. The styles try to express both his state of consciousness and the state of society."

You might underline the three words naturalistic, expressionistic, and surrealistic. If Ellison is right in his analysis, then these are the three major styles of the novel. "Naturalistic" means faithful to the small details of outward reality or nature. "Expressionistic" means characters and actions standing for inner states. "Surrealistic" means tending to deal with the world of dreams and the unconscious. Thus, the scenes at the college are naturalistic, the scenes at the paint factory are expressionistic, and the scenes from the Harlem riot chapters at the end are surrealistic. We will explore the significance of these stylistic shifts more fully in The Story section. For now you may want to think about why Ellison felt that realism alone was not enough. What could these other styles do for him that realism could not?

^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: POINT OF VIEW

Invisible Man is a first-person narrative told by a developing character. That means you can trust his perceptions and judgments much more toward the end of the novel than you can at the beginning.

At the beginning (leaving out the Prologue, which we will look at later with the Epilogue) the narrator is young and naive. In Chapter 1 he is a high school graduate. In Chapters 2 to 6 he is a college junior. He has experienced little of the real world. As a result he misinterprets, misses ironies, and makes naive judgments about other characters. Your interpretation of the events of the first third of the novel must be colored by your awareness that the narrator is frequently missing the point. You must be more mature and perceptive than he is.