Mr. Norton and the Narrator's innocence

Through the discussions of Invisible Man I noticed how large of a change the narrator went through to achieve self-realization of invisibility. I immediately noticed the narrator’s intense awareness of his image to others in the end of the book, and found it funny to look back and see how innocent he was in the beginning. I specifically wanted to analyze the narrator’s innocence and how it was affected and encouraged by Mr. Norton’s innocence in the beginning of Invisible Man.

One of the more obvious scenes where the narrator and Mr. Norton’s innocence was exposed and ridiculed, was when the vet was treating Mr. Norton in the Golden Day. The vet comes into Mr. Norton’s room as this wise figure who can see the narrator’s and Mr. Norton’s blindness at first glimpse. The vet tries to test the extent of their blindness by telling Mr. Norton “To some you are the great white father, to others the lyncher of souls”. Stating that, to people like the narrator you are their savior and a godly figure that has money, power, and benevolence, but if you’re not blind you can see Mr. Norton’s ignorant destructiveness. The narrator, confused, then asks “What do you mean [Lyncher]?”, and to answer the question the vet shows how Mr. Norton is blind to his destructiveness.

He asks Mr. Norton why he’s interested in the school to which Mr. Norton replies, “I felt, and still feel, that your people are in some important manner tied to my destiny”, his destiny being his success. Then Mr. Norton states “I’ve watched it grow each year I’ve returned to the campus”. First of all whenever someone uses the words “your people” it never sounds good, in this case because he doesn’t know how to classify the group of people yet he wants to learn about them. Also Mr. Norton says that he’s “watched it grow each year [he’s] come back to the campus” in order to find out the how his success has grown through the success of black people, but he’s blinding himself because he’s blocking himself from the outskirts of campus where the real poverty is. Basically setting up a system that always leads to his destiny being successful because he’s checking the Campus where all the successful blacks are.

When the vet realizes that the narrator is confused by this, he goes on to ridicules the narrator because he’s so blind that he couldn’t even consider the possibility that Mr. Norton is misguided. So the vet goes on to making comments to Mr. Norton like, “He has eyes and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life” “He registers with his senses but short circuits his brain. Nothing has meaning”, and “Behold! A walking zombie! Already he’s learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He’s invisible”. So the narrator is just going along with the way things are, and even though he sees all these inequalities he doesn’t do anything about it because he’s so innocent. I also noticed that the vet says these comments in a rhetorical tone because he knows that they are both blind to each other, and there’s no use changing it, because like Bledsoe and the narrator’s grandfather said, there’s no use in changing the way things are you just have to keep running.

Ultimately, the narrator’s innocence is affected by Mr. Norton’s innocence because the narrator believes in Mr. Norton’s destiny being the success of people like him, and Mr. Norton depends on him for success. So in a sense their innocence complement each other, and keep each other running because they both believe in each other’s false ideals. One of the last thoughts I want to put out there is that, if you notice it, it’s interesting to see how in the beginning of the book the narrator’s surroundings are invisible to him, but in the end he becomes invisible to his surroundings, showing us both sides of the spectrum.

The importance of self-reliance and identity gained through Emerson

           When the Invisible man is sent out of college to go to Harlem, he is sent with seven letters of recommendations, but after a while he finds himself in a bad situation with one letter left. This letter is directed to Mr. Emerson whose son is a key factor towards the making the invisible man’s self-reliance.

            Now Mr. Emerson might not ring a bell in some readers’ minds, but because the author’s name is Ralph Ellison, and the invisible man is about to meet Mr. Emerson, I immediately put it together to get Ralph Waldo Emerson, a popular transcendentalist who taught of self-reliance. Additionally, because Emerson was the invisible Man’s last chance, it served as a metaphor to the invisible man’s last chance of gaining this self-reliance. Which he indirectly does so through the son of the man whom the author is comparing to Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson’s son attempts to push the invisible man towards a path of self-reliance and identity when he reads the so called letter of recommendation and realizes the situation the invisible man is in.  Afterwards, Emerson realizes how naïve the he is, and tells the Invisible man, “To help you I must disillusion you”, but the invisible man is still clueless as to what is going on and totally confused. So when Emerson’s son sees this, he knows that it’s going to take more convincing for the invisible man to realize what scheme he’s a target of, so he shows him the letter. When the invisible man finishes reading the letter, Emerson’s son says “there’s no point in blinding yourself to the truth, don’t blind yourself” and immediately the invisible man got up “dazed” at the situation.

In result of the invisible man’s state of shock, I realized that he started to show emotions for the first time. For example, when the invisible man brings up the idea that maybe he was cheated out of the job “Suddenly [he] shook with anger”. Then when he thinks about how he fell for Bledsoe’s plan he “laughed and felt numb and weak”. These emotions, gained through this self-reliance, were the first signs I saw of the invisible man’s true identity, with the laughter implying that he has moved on from the naïve way he treated people in the past. Showing that he’s his own person now, not caring about what others think about him and not molding himself to be what others want him to be.

Overall in my opinion this chapter was the real turning point for the invisible man because he finally realized that throughout his whole life so far he was blinding himself from the inequalities and flaws in society, which was hurting him. His blindness being that he was constantly overlooking people and society because of the seriousness and ambition which he took upon life. Causing him to look at people solely for their position in society and race but not any deeper, which in result slowly made him subject to the corruptness of Bledsoe and society itself while he was still in his own world. For the most part I enjoyed this moment in the book and felt a sense of relief when he started showing his true identity, because I realized that it meant he was changing from the clueless, law abiding, and confused invisible man, to the self-reliant and independent invisible man. 

How Bigger Thomas’s social state affects his actions

Richard wright who portrays Bigger Thomas as the stereotypical black man living in the South Side of Chicago, shows the oppression and racism that Bigger has to experience every day. Through Native Son, I noticed how Wright implies that Bigger’s actions were a product of his (Bigger’s) trapped feeling in this white world, while giving a glimpse of how other upper class whites would confuse the meaning behind Bigger’s actions as a generalization of the evil nature in every black human being.

            These frequent little examples, in Native Son, which give Bigger this trapped feeling, almost become normal to the point where sometimes I passed them over, disregarding it. For example, in one of the first scenes of Native Son when Bigger walked out the door of his house for the first time, and saw a poster of Buckley with his “index finger pointed straight out to each passer-by” and written above “were tall red letters: YOU CAN’T WIN” (Wright, pg. 13), I saw the extent to which Bigger is oppressed, with the sign, as if it was waiting for him right outside his house, being a metaphor reminding Bigger that everywhere he goes, he has to follow the rules of what society tells him he should be.

            This constant pounding of oppression Bigger is receiving, has its effects and shows itself in one of the next scenes where Bigger is with his friends, Jack, G.H, and Gus. Immediately, I noticed how aggressive and dominant he tries to act around them, and at one point he even threatens Gus by putting the “tip of a blade into Gus’s shirt” (Wright, pg. 39). Initially when I read it, I thought to myself that Bigger just had some anger problems, and didn’t know how to control it. But I realized later on that there was more to it. He acted the way he did because when he’s around people of his own race, it’s the only time he can express his freedom showing them he can do what he wants, therefore convincing himself that he is living in a free world.

            On the other hand, when Bigger is around whites, he is noticeably humbler and conserved, almost a totally different person by saying as little as possible and following instructions. So it comes to him as a surprise when he is introduced to an energetic Mary Dalton, who tries to be empathetic to him by “respond[ing] to him as if he were human”. This attitude somehow makes Bigger feel even more trapped because he doesn’t know how to act when approached this way, so he’s not used to it. When he is in the car with Jan and Mary, he can either express all his feelings to them and comply, or act formal and humble, the way the country has taught him to act around white folks. Later on, this discomfort brings Bigger to kill Mary, and by doing, so he also breaks free of what people would think the stereotypical black male would do, “he had done something that even he though not possible” (Wright, pg. 106) and he enjoys that feeling of freedom he has, owning up to it.

            But what is of greater importance to this narrative, is what Max expresses in court. He tells the judge that this case is not solely Bigger’s fault, but that there were also some serious social aspects in his life that made him act the way he did. He says that “It was but a tiny aspect of what he had been doing all his life! He was living, only as he knew how” (Wright pg. 400), so Bigger was just a product of society and acted the only way he knew how to. Max goes onto say that if the larger problem of this court case isn’t solved, which is saving this racist society first, then there will be hundreds more Bigger Thomas’s in this world, and nothing is achieved in the long run by executing Bigger. Looking back on it, Mary Dalton was only trying to help this race problem and happened to start with Bigger, but Bigger didn’t realize and took it negatively because of the life he’s had, which taught him these irreversible tension between blacks and whites.