"invisible man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)
At the end of the chapter the narrator is furious. He leaves the office and returns to Men's House with "they picked poor Robin clean" on his brain. He swears revenge on Bledsoe. But before he can kill Bledsoe, he has to have a job. So he takes a job at the Liberty Paint Factory, the place Mr. Emerson has sent a number of young men before. The juxtaposition of the projected murder and the job is wonderfully ironic, and allows you to see, once more, the difference between the hero's real character and his perception of himself. Poor Robin!
^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: CHAPTER 10
If you are the adventuresome type, you will have a field day with Chapter 10. It's one of the liveliest, most imaginative chapters in the novel. Because it is symbolic, it will challenge you from beginning to end to use your mind while you are reading.
The narrator arrives at the plant on Long Island and sees a huge electric sign announcing KEEP AMERICA PURE WITH LIBERTY PAINTS. As he enters one of the buildings and walks down a "pure white hall," you are alerted to the fact that the plant is going to be a symbol for white America. The company's trademark is "a screaming eagle," and they specialize in white paint, pure white paint, which they sell to the government. Apparently the Liberty Paint Company uses a number of "colored college boys" so that they don't have to pay union wages. But the black workers are well hidden.
The narrator is sent by Mr. MacDuffy to work for a Mr. Kimbro, the terrible Mr. Kimbro (who is called "Colonel"--perhaps suggesting the tyranny of the colonels of the Old South over blacks) in the paint-testing department. Kimbro's job is to inspect the paint before it is loaded, and he shows the narrator how to assist him. The paint looks brown on the surface, before it is mixed, but after it is stirred, the brown disappears and the paint turns white. But Kimbro is not satisfied. The paint isn't white enough, and so he directs the narrator to put ten drops of black coloring into each bucket to make it a purer white--"Optic White," which is the company's specialty. It doesn't make much sense to the narrator to use black coloring to make paint white, but Kimbro says, "You just do what you're told and don't try to think about it."
Kimbro has to go to a production conference, and the narrator runs out of coloring. So he goes to the tank room to get more but finds that there are two tanks that look exactly alike. He picks the tank that smells most like the coloring, refills his bucket, and completes the job. When Kimbro comes back, he is furious. The narrator, by thinking for himself, has picked the wrong tank and used concentrated remover instead. Kimbro has him put the proper coloring into the cans with the remover and seems satisfied that the problem has been solved, even though the narrator thinks the paint looks a little gray.
How do you interpret the symbolism of this little story? If the black coloring stands for black people, then how are black people used to make white America work? "Optic White" means white in appearance, or to the eye, as in optical illusion. The white paint is not really white, as America is not really white, but it requires blacks behind the scenes in cooperation with whites to make the white world work. What kinds of blacks does white America need to have in order to keep up this facade? Perhaps Mr. Kimbro's treatment of the narrator suggests the answer.
NOTE: EXPRESSIONISM In the section on "Style" Ellison was quoted as saying that the style of the novel was at first realistic, but that it became expressionistic after the narrator moved North. Chapters 10 and 11 are perhaps the best examples of Ellison's expressionism (review the Style section for a definition). Chapters 10 and 11 are hard to believe literally. If you read them as realistic pictures of life in a paint factory, you will be disappointed. What Ellison is doing here is trying to depict expressionistically what white America is doing to blacks for its own selfish ends. The real action of these chapters is inner, not outer.
In the second half of Chapter 10, the scene shifts to the basement of Building No. 2. Kimbro has sent the narrator here, because he doesn't want anyone who thinks for himself working for him. Thinking creates trouble! The narrator's boss in the basement is an old black man named Lucius Brockway. Brockway makes the guts of the paint down in this deep basement. Again, note the symbolism. Deep underground a black man makes the guts of the white paint that keeps this white factory going. Not only does he make it, he is the one who coined the slogan, "If It's Optic White, It's the Right White." The narrator realizes that this is just another way of saying, "If you're white, you're right."
If you are enjoying the fun of Ellison's complex symbolism, you have probably figured out that Lucius Brockway is like the ten drops of black coloring the narrator had to pour in the bucket to make Optic White look white. Without the black man in the basement doing the dirty work, the whites would be lost. No one knows how to make the paint except Lucius. If he retired, the place would collapse. And he likes it. He is the perfect Uncle Tom. He sacrifices himself (he keeps out of sight) to keep the whites white.
The narrator and Lucius get along well until the narrator stumbles across a union meeting on his way to get his lunch out of his locker. The union people think he is a fink, a hired strike breaker, because he works for Lucius, whom they hate. Then, when the narrator returns, Lucius calls him a louse for attending the union meeting. The Invisible Man can't win.
The narrator may be naive, but he is a fighter. Just as he argued with Bledsoe and young Mr. Emerson, he holds his own with Lucius Brockway, and because he is younger and physically stronger, he can force Brockway to back down. Brockway finally admits that he doesn't like the union because it is critical of the white bosses. The union threatens the relationship between white power and black Uncle Toms. But just as the narrator thinks that peace has been restored, Brockway notices that the pressure gauge his new assistant is supposed to have been watching has gone way up. The narrator has literally "blown it" again. There is a huge explosion, and the narrator is knocked unconscious into a "blast of black emptiness that was somehow a bath of whiteness." The symbolism of the chapter is complete. The black man is immersed in a world of white.
^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: CHAPTER 11
If the primary symbolism of Chapter 10 is black vs white, then Chapter 11 operates around the symbolism of death and rebirth. In this chapter the narrator, who has been symbolically killed in Chapter 10, is resurrected with a new identity.
The action takes place in the factory hospital, where the narrator has been taken after the explosion. He is examined and then subjected to electric shock treatment. After the electric shock, he wakes to find himself lying in "a kind of glass and nickel box." He is being used for some sort of experiment. He hears men talking outside the box. One is a surgeon who would like to do a prefrontal lobotomy on him, or perhaps, castration. The surgeon wants to cut out of the black man anything that would allow him to be thoughtful or creative, in any sense.
The other man is the inventor of the machine in which the narrator finds himself. The man believes that his machine--with its electric shock--will have all the positive effects of the surgery (making the black man docile and cooperative) without the negative effects. The two argue over the narrator as if he were some kind of object, finally deciding to use the machine. After another series of shocks, the narrator feels himself in a warm, watery world. It is as if he is an infant being born.
He emerges from the womb, and people begin to ask him questions. WHAT IS YOUR NAME? WHAT IS YOUR MOTHER'S NAME? WHO WAS BUCKEYE THE RABBIT?
NOTE: BUCKEYE THE RABBIT In Afro-American folklore, Buckeye the Rabbit is the same as Brer Rabbit. Both had the reputation in a variety of tales of being able to escape from the most difficult predicaments by their cleverness and toughness. The most famous of these tales is the story of the Tar Baby, to which Ellison refers more than once in the novel. Perhaps the narrator, like Brer Rabbit, escapes from the machine because he remembers these stories from his childhood and they help give him a toughness, an identity of sorts, at a time when the whites are trying to destroy it altogether. Because he says nothing to them, they don't know what he is thinking.
As the chapter ends, the narrator is released from the hospital, having been pronounced "cured." The whites believe that he is "safe" now, that he will not do any more harm, because he has lost his old identity entirely. They get him to sign some release papers, and they will pay him compensation in return for a promise not to hold them responsible. He leaves the hospital, remembering the song he sang at the end of Chapter 9: "They picked poor Robin clean."
^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: CHAPTER 12
Chapter 12 is a transitional chapter, marking the end of the first half of the novel and the beginning of the second. The narrator emerges from the subway onto Lenox Avenue in Harlem feeling like an infant. Totally helpless after his experience in the hospital, he needs someone to care for him, and that someone appears in the person of Mary Rambo (see The Characters).
The narrator is a child who needs a mother, and Mary--big bosomed, deep-voiced, patient, and loving--has been created for the role. She takes him to her boarding house, puts him to bed, and watches over him until he is strong enough to go back to Men's House. She invites him to come back and stay, where she can care for him and keep him from becoming corrupted by New York.
He returns to Men's House, but he is not the same man who left it: "My overalls were causing stares and I knew that I could live there no longer, that that phase of my life was past." He can no longer dream of moving up in the white man's world. And because he no longer has that dream, his vision of Men's House changes. He (in his painter's overalls) sees the young men with their Brooks Brothers suits and briefcases and umbrellas as a bunch of phonies. As he starts toward the elevator he sees a figure in front of him whom he immediately believes to be Bledsoe. In his mind he calls him "Bled," appropriate for the man who has "bled" him so. Suddenly all the hate and frustration in him rises, and he picks up a brass spittoon full of "brown liquid" and dumps it over the man's head. But it is not Bledsoe! Instead, it is a well-known Baptist minister, and the narrator is forced to run for cover. This is the last he sees of Men's House; they have barred him for "ninety-nine years and a day."
His old identity is gone, and a new one has started to grow within him. He returns to Mary's as a child returns to its parent. She nurtures him, but she also pushes him, as a mother, to grow up and do something responsible. He senses that she is right, but he doesn't know what to do. He has no contacts, no job, no direction. His compensation money is running out, and winter is coming on. His head is full of voices, full of the desire to speak out (but about what he doesn't know). He tries to face the reality of his condition for the first time. The invisible man is on the verge of discovering a new self, another identity.
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