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.