Thematic Analysis

Lindsey S.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is a novel that contains numerous themes, which impact every aspect of the narrator’s life and fate of invisibility. From chapter 20 to the conclusion in the epilogue, although many smaller themes exist, one main one protrudes over the rest. This theme even influenced the narrator previous to his realization of it.

As stated in the previous blog by M Annunziato, the narrator is invited into an organization called The Brotherhood and quickly accepts their invitation. Although this organization at first glance appears to be fighting for the common good of the future and the repressed people, it truly is not. This organization manipulates the population, especially the narrator, in which we can observe very closely, for their own goals and wants. Although the Northern United States appeared to be far more advanced than the South in the matters of racial equality, this appearance was very deceiving. In the South, white men openly showed their discrimination against African Americans, where as in the North, the men hid theirs and used the African Americans to their advantage. This racism proves to cause the narrator to become unsure of his identity and crawl into his “invisibility”.

Although it seems quite strange that a man can become invisible, this invisibility involves the mind and thoughts of the people around him, not only the physical view. The narrator becomes invisible due to the limitations that The Brotherhood invisibly placed upon him. While the narrator believed he was freely fighting prejudices for the world, he was a “tool”. The Brotherhood only allowed him to do what they desired, guiding his efforts into the path they wanted, but guiding below the level to which the narrator could see. This guiding force caused the narrator to not be seen for who he truly is, thus causing the invisibility and his problems concerning his identity.

The narrator of the novel had been pushed to feel a certain way or to do a certain things by the Brotherhood. “And although I knew no one man could do much about it, I felt responsible. All our work had been very little, no great change had been made. And it was all my fault. I’d been so fascinated by the motion that I’d forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth. I’d been asleep, dreaming.” (444) This quote exemplifies how the Brotherhood had slanted the narrator’s thoughts to thinking that the world was his responsibility. They made him feel as if every incident that went wrong was his failure. These thoughts however, would not have been the narrator’s true thoughts had the Brotherhood not slanted them. This causes his identity crisis. “ Outside the Brotherhood we were outside history; but inside of it they didn’t see us.”(499) The Brotherhood enforced a code of how the Brothers behaved and thought. They refused to see the true person inside anyone, as well as to accept it, if it didn’t help them in their true plight. “It was not suicide, but murder. The committee had planned it. And I had helped, had been a tool. A tool just at the very moment I had thought myself free.” (553) This quote shows that the Brotherhood blinded the narrator from their true purpose, keeping racism intact by influencing him to cause greater racism in ways that seemed to do the contrary. He once again makes himself responsible for what is occurring, yet now realizes how he was used as “a tool”. He believed the North was freedom for African Americans, a thought that was obviously wrong, and the Brotherhood had used that mistake to their advantage. “I am invisible, not blind” is spoken by the narrator to show that although he is not acknowledged as the true him by the Brotherhood, he can see the person they are imprinting into him. (576) He can see the horrible things they are doing and the ways they are succeeding. . “Here I had thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn’t see either color or men…” (508) The narrator believed that the Brotherhood wanted white and black to be too colors of equal stance, but realizes that no matter what color anyone’s skin was, they truly did not care. They only cared for themselves and they manipulated anyone without even realizing who they were, but only changing them completely.

The Brotherhoods racism influences the narrator to question his identity and his existence as a person. “ ‘His name was Clifton and he was black and they shot him. Isn’t that enough to tell?’” portrays the racism that progressively forced into society by the Brotherhood. (456) The narrator begins to realize that the world is in this same scenario as Clifton. “He’s in the box and we’re in there with him’”. (458) All African Americans were placed into this “box” by the white men and the Brotherhood because of their desire for racial inequality, the opposite thing to which the African Americans thought to have been achieved. “Thus one of the greatest jokes in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and be becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray.” (557) This quote basically sums up the effect to which the Brotherhood had on society as a whole. Their racism caused the blacks that were trying to stand next to the whites, into an area where they became “dull” or unnoticed, resulting in invisibility and the questioning of identity.