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

Chapter 1, originally published before the rest of the novel as a short story called "Battle Royal," is the most famous chapter of the novel. It is often discussed by readers as a story complete in itself. You may enjoy reading it as a kind of parable about the general condition of black people in the South before the Civil Rights movement that began in the late 1950s.

The narrator is seventeen or eighteen. He has just graduated from high school in a southern town called Greenwood and has made a speech in the style of Booker T. Washington calling for blacks to be socially responsible and cooperative with whites. He has been invited, as the top-ranked black student, to give the speech again to a group of the leading white male citizens of the town at an evening "smoker" in the ballroom of the town's main hotel. What he does not know is that before he is allowed to give the speech, he must participate with nine other black boys in a "battle royal."

The ten black boys, supplied with shorts and boxing gloves, are herded like cattle into the ballroom, where they are forced to watch a blonde white woman do a provocative striptease, full of sexually arousing movements. The narrator is both attracted and repulsed by this woman. She is a symbol of everything the black man must confront in America. He is made to want her, but told he cannot have her, ordered to watch her, but punished should he show any signs of desiring her. At the same time she is mauled and caressed by drunken white men who can do what they want and go unpunished because they have the power.

The whites are both sadistic and hypocritical. They obviously enjoy watching the black boys suffer and seem to feel no guilt over their own behavior. After the girl is carried out, they blindfold the ten black boys and force them into a ring where they will blindly attack one another and get paid by the whites for it. Many readers have noticed that the "battle royal" is a prefiguration of the ending, where the blacks in Harlem riot, essentially hurting one another, while the whites stand by and watch.

NOTE: BLINDNESS AS SYMBOL Throughout the novel the contrast between sight and blindness will play a major role. In this scene the symbol of blindness is introduced through the imaginative use of the blindfolds. Reread the battle royal scene and look for the various ways in which the inability to see outwardly parallels the inability to understand inwardly. The narrator is able to avoid being hurt when he can peep through his blindfold. One of the boys breaks his hand because he hits the ring post. The fight is sheer anarchy, because blindness reduces the black boys to nothing more than flailing beasts. How can blacks expect to gain dignity when they are figuratively "blindfolded" by whites?

After a period of time, the blindfolds are removed and the narrator finds himself alone in the ring with a big black named Tatlock. They are expected to box for the championship. At first the narrator does well, but when he hears one of the powerful whites say, "I got my money on the big boy," he stops trying, because he is afraid that he might offend the whites by winning and thus not be asked to make his speech. As a result, he is knocked out.

But his humiliation is not over. When he recovers, the other boys are brought back in, and all of them are told to get their money from a rug covered with coins, bills, and gold pieces. They scramble for the money, only to be violently shocked. The rug has been electrified. This scene is not only horrifying in itself, but as some readers have noticed, it foreshadows the scene in Chapter 11 when the narrator is given electric shock therapy in the factory hospital, again by white people, who find it interesting to "experiment" on blacks.

Before he is allowed to receive the award for achievement, the young narrator is forced to undergo one more humiliation. He must give the speech, his mouth filled with blood and saliva, to an audience of drunks who either mock or ignore him. He is forced to repeat the phrase "social responsibility," and at one point he mistakenly says "social equality." There is a sudden stillness in the room; the boy corrects himself, and everything is all right. But the point of the lesson is clear. Blacks are to rise, but always and only by the rules whites make.

To encourage him along these lines, the white leaders present him with a calfskin briefcase, in which he finds a document announcing his scholarship to the "state college for Negroes." Both of these props are important in the subsequent development of the novel. The briefcase follows the narrator through all his adventures and remains in the hole with him at the end. Most of the narrator's significant possessions wind up in that briefcase. The scholarship, of course, is the first item in the briefcase. More importantly, it is the first of three crucial pieces of paper given to the narrator by white groups. Each of these pieces of paper serves to identify him, name him for a portion of the novel.

The meaning of these documents is suggested in a dream the narrator has at the end of the chapter. He dreams he is at the circus with his strange grandfather and that he is asked to open his briefcase. In it is a letter, and in that another letter, and so endlessly until a final document engraved in gold contains the words: "To Whom It May Concern, Keep This Nigger-Boy Running." At the time the narrator is too young and too naive to understand the meaning of the dream. What is your interpretation?

^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: CHAPTER 2

Three years have passed. The narrator is now a junior at the state college for blacks. He is doing very well and has been such a model student that he is entrusted with the job of chauffeuring important guests around the campus and its surroundings.

NOTE: THE COLLEGE AND ELIOT'S THE WASTE LAND Before the action of Chapter 2 begins, the narrator describes the college in terms borrowed directly from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. We know that Ellison read the poem during his years at Tuskegee Institute (the model for the college in the novel), and in this section he implies that the college was a kind of waste land by using Eliot's language. "Why does no rain fall through my recollections?" the narrator asks, paralleling the narrator's thoughts of dryness in Eliot. And the phrase "Oh, oh, oh those multimillionaires" is borrowed from Eliot's "O O O O that Shakespeherean Rag." When you get deeper into the book, you will be better able to understand why the narrator views the college as a waste land. What clues do you have at this point?

The chapter opens on Founder's Day, the day set aside each spring to honor the mythical founder of the college. Many of the distinguished white multimillionaires who serve as trustees are present for the occasion. The narrator has been engaged to drive one of them, a Mr. Norton. Since there is plenty of time before Mr. Norton's next engagement, they drive into the country and end up at the run-down farm of a black sharecropper named Jim Trueblood. Mr. Norton wants to find out the age and history of the place, but the narrator is uncomfortable at the thought of stopping. Trueblood had created a scandal by having fathered a child of his own daughter, and the narrator knows the school officials will be furious if they discover that Mr. Norton has been to see Trueblood. But Norton is fascinated, and the more the narrator tells him about Trueblood, the more Norton wants to talk with him. We begin to understand Norton's interest in Trueblood when we remember the white man's conversation with the narrator at the start of the chapter. Norton had been telling the narrator about his only daughter, whom he loved more than anything else in the world. He and his daughter had been traveling in Europe when she died. Norton's gifts to the black college have all been in her memory. Did Norton feel an incestuous attraction to his daughter? Is he fascinated by Trueblood because Trueblood did what he, Norton, wanted (in his blood) to do but was terrified of doing? You will have to decide what you think here, but many readers have found the parallels between Norton and Trueblood intriguing and important.

Norton persuades Trueblood to tell his story. What Trueblood has to say is important not only for what he reveals but also for how he tells it. Trueblood is the first of several important Afro-American folk figures that Ellison creates. He is a storyteller, a singer of spirituals, and a blues singer. He tells Norton, "...while I'm singin' them blues I makes up my mind that I ain't nobody but myself and ain't nothin' I can do but let whatever is gonna happen, happen." This is a lesson that it will take the narrator the entire novel to learn.

Trueblood doesn't think it out before he commits incest with his daughter. He doesn't plan it. Perhaps his name "True" combined with "blood" suggests his character. He is true to himself and he follows his blood. The incest takes place almost in a dream where he can feel his body doing it without his mind really knowing that it is happening. Afterwards his wife Kate nearly kills him with an axe, but he decides to stay with his wife and daughter and both their children. He will live the best he can, no matter what people say. The blacks at the college hate him (and, of course, the narrator is one of them) because they see him as the sort of black man they are trying not to be. But white people are fascinated by Trueblood. They give him money and come to hear his story, and so he ends up much better off than he was before the incident. Norton, too, gives Trueblood $100 after hearing the story, and the narrator is furious. "You no good bastard!" he says under his breath, not wanting to offend the white man, and the scene is complete.

^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: CHAPTER 3

The shock of Trueblood's story has made Mr. Norton feel faint, and he asks the narrator to get him some whiskey. The only place the narrator can think to take him is the Golden Day, a wild combination of tavern and house of prostitution that is--like Trueblood's place--off limits to the college students. It is a world that the leaders at the college pretend does not exist. Just as the narrator pulls up to the Golden Day, a group of black war veterans from the local state hospital are on their way to the place for their weekly recreation. They have all been affected mentally by their war experience and exhibit a variety of bizarre symptoms. They allow the narrator's car to pass when he tells them he is driving General Pershing, their commander in the war.

The narrator doesn't want Mr. Norton to see the patients or the girls; so he asks the bartender to let him take the whiskey to the car. The bartender refuses, and there is no way to revive Norton, who has by now passed out, except to carry him into the Golden Day and pour the whiskey down his throat. Norton revives, but at this moment a huge black named Supercargo, who is the attendant, appears on the balcony. The vets hate him and charge the stairs. A riot breaks out, and in the process the narrator loses Mr. Norton. Finally, he finds him, passed out again, under the stairs. This time some of the vets carry Norton upstairs to one of the prostitute's rooms where he is again revived and cared for by a whore named Edna and a patient named Burnside, who was a doctor before the war.

NOTE: BURNSIDE The fat veteran-patient who takes care of Mr. Norton in this chapter makes a brief but significant appearance (you see him only once more, in Chapter 7, on the bus to New York). He is the first black man who talks openly to a white man, and that fact scares the narrator, who is too intimidated by whites to realize that they are just human beings, too. Burnside is a doctor, and he not only knows that Norton needs help ("He's only a man. Remember that."), but he knows that the narrator is "a walking zombie! Already he's learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity." Burnside tries to teach the narrator a lesson about life, but the narrator is too rigid, too narrow-minded at this point in his life to get the message. So is Mr. Norton. They both see the important work of black-white relations as somehow tied to the college. Burnside, especially, and the other vets at the Golden Day are trying to say that the work must be done in the real world. Since Trueblood and Burnside are an important part of the narrator's education, why does he reject them at this point in his life?

The chapter ends with the narrator and Mr. Norton being literally thrown out the door of the Golden Day. Mr. Norton, who it seemed was nearly dead, makes a strong recovery and walks to the car unaided. "DEAD!" says the bartender, Halley. "He cain't die!" The statement, like so many others, has multiple meanings, one of which is that the white money that Norton represents is always there. It can't be killed. Can you think of other interpretations of this passage?

^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: CHAPTER 4

The narrator, full of fear, drives Mr. Norton back to the campus. The life he has found for himself at the college means everything to him. His goal is to imitate Mr. Bledsoe, the president, by becoming an educator, by returning to teach at the college after he has completed his own training. He hates Jim Trueblood and the vets at the Golden Day for ruining his life, because all he can see now is that he will surely be dismissed for what has happened to Mr. Norton. And yet, somehow, it does not seem to be his fault. It just happened!

But whether it is his fault or not, he must face the consequences in the person of the furious Dr. Bledsoe. He lashes out at the narrator in language that the narrator has never heard before. "Damn what he wants," says Bledsoe about Mr. Norton, "we take these white folks where we want them to go, we show them what we want them to see." The narrator cannot believe he is hearing such talk from Dr. Bledsoe, who has always been so humble and dignified and apparently obedient to the wishes of white people. In front of Mr. Norton, Bledsoe returns to the role of the polite but humble black educator; alone with the narrator he is blunt and brutal, but the narrator is too naive to grasp what is going on.

He returns to his room and tries to puzzle out Bledsoe's behavior, but before he can, a message sends him back to Mr. Norton's room at Rabb Hall. Mr. Norton is a different person now. Bathed and dressed in fresh clothes, he is the distant northern trustee you might have expected to meet earlier. He is civil but cool toward the narrator and informs him that he is leaving the college that evening and will no longer require the narrator's services. He sends the boy out the door, reminding him that he is to see Dr. Bledsoe in his office after vespers.