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

^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: CHAPTER 13

Chapter 13 is the central chapter of the novel. In a novel with 25 chapters, a Prologue, and an Epilogue, it is near the exact middle. That is no accident, for in this chapter the narrator undergoes the most important event in his life thus far: He finds a calling as a spokesman for his people. There are three important events in the chapter: (1) the episode with the yam seller, (2) the narrator's speech at the eviction, and (3) his first conversation with the dominant figure of the second half of the novel, Brother Jack.

As the chapter opens, the narrator is profoundly unsettled. He has no job, no money, no identity. As he rushes out of the house into the street, he runs into the yam seller, an old man "wrapped in an army overcoat, his feet covered with gunny sacks, his head in a knitted cap...." Had the narrator run into the yam seller even as much as two or three chapters earlier, he would have avoided him as the very type of black man he most disapproved of--an old country black, uneducated, crude, and poor. But something in the factory experience has changed the narrator, and the yams remind him of home, of his family and childhood. He is hungry--both literally and figuratively--for the hot yams, bubbling with butter and syrup. He buys one and eats it, right there on the street. All at once he has what James Joyce called an "epiphany"--a sudden moment of illumination, of insight into himself. He says, "It was exhilarating. I no longer had to worry about who saw me or about what was proper... to hell with being ashamed of what you liked. No more of that for me."

He buys two yams and eats them on the street for all to see. He feels a new sense of freedom, and he announces, "I yam what I am."

He suddenly thinks of proper Dr. Bledsoe, that model of propriety, eating chitterlings secretly in private so white men won't see him. He laughs and accuses Bledsoe of being a secret chitterling eater, of "relishing hog bowels." He will expose Bledsoe as a fraud.

NOTE: CHITTERLINGS Sometimes called "chitlins" or "chittlings," chitterlings are the cooked small intestines of hogs. In this section, Ellison has the narrator mention not only chitterlings, but also pigs' ears, pork chops, black-eyed peas, and mustard greens. All these are foods commonly eaten by southern blacks. Bledsoe and the narrator have been trying to deny both their blackness and their southern heritage. They have denied their fundamental roots in black folk culture. The narrator suddenly realizes that he really likes these foods, but that he has stopped eating them because he is afraid of what others will think.

Armed with this new understanding about himself, that I am what I am, I am what I like, I can choose what I want to do on the basis of personal preference, the narrator feels both free and frightened. This new ability to be one's self implies the making of personal choices. He has never done that. He always did what others expected of him. As he thinks about this, he comes upon a scene in the street. An old black couple is being evicted from their apartment. All their personal belongings and furniture are being piled in the street by white marshals. A crowd has gathered, sullen, angry, resentful at what is being done.

The narrator has never seen an eviction. His eyes are opened for the first time to the reality of black life in America. He has always worked for whites. Now he begins seeing, both literally and figuratively. He sees the couple's possessions on the street, and he understands the meaning of these possessions. It is as if his own grandparents are being evicted. He feels a sense of emotional identification with these old people. They are his people. "It is as though I myself was being dispossessed of some painful yet precious thing which I could not bear to lose...."

The old woman, Mrs. Provo, tries to go back into the house to pray one last time, but the marshals refuse to let her. One of them strikes her, and suddenly the mob becomes angry. Then almost without warning the narrator becomes a leader. He fears the violence of the crowd and of himself, and he starts speaking to the group, trying to move the people to constructive action instead of useless violence. All the speeches he made in school and college seem to have prepared him for this moment. The words come pouring out. He plays on the theme of dispossession, saying that all blacks are dispossessed, and he tries to persuade the marshals to let them all go in and pray. The crowd, moved by his speech, rushes past the marshals into the house, punching and beating them as they go. The narrator himself is caught up in the emotion of the scene. "Let's go in and pray," he shouts, "But we'll need some chairs." From chairs it is just a step to everything else, and the crowd excitedly starts carrying all the articles from the street back into the house.

At this point the narrator notices two white people, a man and a woman, who don't seem to be marshals. They act friendly, but not like anyone the narrator has ever seen before. They encourage the people to have a protest march, but before anything can be organized, the police come and break up the scene. The white woman tells the narrator to escape across the roofs of the buildings. "The longer you remain unknown to the police, the longer you'll be effective," she says. The narrator doesn't understand what she's saying, but he does what she suggests. He takes off across the roofs, followed by the white man who seems to be chasing him. He outdistances the man, goes down the stairs of another building at the end of the block, and walks out into the street. The police are nowhere to be seen, but he has not lost the man, who comes up to him and says, "That was a masterful bit of persuasion, brother."

The man takes the narrator to a cafeteria, buys him coffee and cheesecake (which the narrator has never tasted), and explains who he is. His name is Brother Jack and he works for an organization known as the Brotherhood. He is impressed with the narrator's speaking ability and wants him to join the organization and become a spokesman in Harlem, "someone who can articulate the grievances of the people." The narrator is hesitant. What is this organization? What do they want with him? Are they just interested in using him like everyone else? He thinks about it, then turns Brother Jack down, but he takes his phone number in case he changes his mind. Another important piece of paper!

NOTE: THE BROTHERHOOD AND THE COMMUNIST PARTY Much has been written by a variety of critics about the relationship between the Brotherhood and the Communist party. Ellison himself comments on it in his "Art of Fiction" interview, and the American scholar and social critic Irving Howe (see The Critics) discusses it in some detail. This study guide comments on Ellison's relation to the Communists in the The Author and His Times section. While Ellison did not intend the Brotherhood to represent only the Communist party, he never denied that the parallel was valid. The Brotherhood may represent any organization that uses individuals and/or minority groups to enhance its own cause. We will explore this topic further as we go along.

^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: CHAPTER 14

The narrator returns to Mary's and smells cabbage cooking. Since it's the third time this week Mary has cooked cabbage, the narrator assumes rightly that Mary must be short of money. He stops to think about Brother Jack's offer. Maybe he has made a mistake. How can he turn down a job when Mary needs the money and he is several months behind in his rent payments? Quickly he changes his mind and calls Brother Jack, who tells him to go to an address on Lenox Avenue. Here the narrator is picked up and whisked off through Central Park downtown to "an expensive-looking building in a strange part of the city." The building is called the Chthonian.

NOTE: CHTHONIAN In Greek mythology this is the name for the realm of the underworld, the realm of the dead. Why has Ellison chosen this name for the building in which the Brotherhood has its meetings? Is the narrator, in some sense, descending into the underworld by joining the Brotherhood? There is an eerie feeling in the building, with its "lobby lighted by dim bulbs" and its elevator that moves in such a way that the narrator is "uncertain whether we had gone up or down." Ellison, as always, is having fun with his symbols.

Brother Jack leads the narrator into an apartment in which a party is going on. The hostess at the party is a woman named Emma, who looks at the narrator in a way quite different from women in the South, a way that makes him uncomfortable. He is taken into the library for a meeting. Point blank he is asked if he would like to be the new Booker T. Washington.

NOTE: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON Booker T. Washington's name is mentioned several times in this chapter. In an earlier note during the discussion of Chapter 5, the parallels between Booker T. Washington and the Founder were discussed. In this chapter, Ellison seems to contradict himself by having the narrator contrast the Founder with Booker T. Washington, treating them as two totally distinct people. You may find this confusing. The author appears to be using Booker T. Washington here for a different purpose than he did in Chapter 5. If you remember that Washington was the white man's idea of the perfect black leader, then the question "Would you like to be the new Booker T. Washington?" becomes highly ironic. It might suggest, "Would you like to be our man in Harlem?" Clearly, Ellison, if not the narrator, has a very ambivalent attitude toward Booker T. Washington.

The narrator accepts the job with the Brotherhood and is immediately given money to pay off his debts, buy new clothes, and change living places. He is to have a totally new identity with no connections whatsoever to the past. He is to leave Mary's, break contact with his parents, and learn his new name, which is handed to him in an envelope by Brother Jack--just as his other identities had been handed to him in envelopes by various people. He is to think of himself as being the new person.

The business over, the new brother is escorted back to the party and introduced to the others. A drunk white man at the piano asks the narrator to sing. After all, all black men sing black folk songs! The moment is extremely embarrassing. Brother Jack is furious and has the drunk brother removed from the room. The narrator, who might have taken offense, treats the matter lightly and the rest of the guests, obviously relieved, apologize for the attitude of their "backward" brother.

Throughout the party scene Ellison reminds you how limited and hypocritical most whites are in understanding and treatment of blacks. The drunk man, like many whites, assumes that the narrator can sing and entertain just because he's black. On the other hand, the more "advanced" whites assume that the narrator understands history, sociology, economics, and politics, without stopping to realize that white America has "done everything they can think of to prevent you from knowing" these things. The chapter closes with the narrator only partially aware of the darker side of the Brotherhood. He needs the money and the job, and he wants to speak. So he is willing to put up with their strange behavior, at least for a time. Later in the novel he will begin to see their real intent.

^^^^^^^^^^INVISIBLE MAN: CHAPTER 15

The narrator spends his last night at Mary's and wakes up early the next morning to the sound of someone above him banging on the steam pipes. It is cold and there is no heat. The chorus of banging picks up, as others awaken, annoyed by the banging. The narrator's head is splitting from the drinking the night before, and he starts furiously on the pipes himself. Out of control, he grabs a cast-iron bank, shaped in the form of a "very black red-lipped and wide-mouthed Negro" and starts banging away. The head breaks, and the bank scatters its coins across the room. Mary hears him from outside and asks what is going on. He quickly sweeps the coins and broken metal into a pile, wraps them in a newspaper, and stuffs it in his overcoat pocket for later disposal.

NOTE: THE SYMBOLISM OF THE BANK You will want to pay close attention to the bank, if you are interested in following Ellison's symbols, because the broken bank stays with the narrator from now until the end of the novel. The bank, like the Sambo dolls that Tod Clifton ends up selling, seems to represent a part of the black past that the narrator would like to hide. Its wide-grinning mouth eats coins. A coin is placed in the hand, and when a lever is thrown, the hand flips the coin into the grinning mouth. Does this suggest what "grinning Negroes" were willing to do for money from white masters? Remember the battle royal scene in Chapter 1 where the black boys scrambled for money on the electrified carpet? Is the narrator selling out to the Brotherhood for money? Keep this rich, complex symbol in mind as you follow it through.

The narrator has coffee with Mary, who seems unshakeably serene in the midst of all the noise. The narrator pulls out a hundred dollar bill and hands it to her in payment of his back rent, and she is overjoyed. She is proud she will be able to pay the bills everyone has been bothering her about. Did he win the money playing the numbers, she asks? Yes, he answers, relieved to find a simple explanation. He is not supposed to let her know he is leaving, nor that he is involved with the Brotherhood. She is so pleased about the money she seems totally unconcerned about what he's doing; so he is able to get his prized briefcase and leave. As he goes out he hears Mary singing the blues, as she always does. It seems to reassure her and bring her peace of mind.

A few blocks down the street he tries to throw the broken bank into a garbage can, but a woman stops him, yelling at him that she doesn't want any trash from "field niggers" in her garbage can. So he is forced to pluck it out. A few more blocks down the street, he just leaves it in the snow, hoping no one will notice, but someone picks it up and returns it to him, accusing him of being some kind of criminal making an illegal "drop." So he finally gives up and puts it in his briefcase, figuring that he will dispose of it later. Don't forget it's there, because it will reappear before the novel's end. The bank, as the previous note suggests, is a part of himself that he just can't get rid of.