Response 7: Is he invisible? Or is he...?

*Disclaimer: I use the word Black in this post not because I’m racist, but because I’ve got many friends back home that say they prefer being called Black to African-American. As my best friend will often tell you, “I’m not from Africa! I’m Guyanese and Jamaican! Hmph!” x) Sorry if I’m not being politically correct by your standards, but my personal experience outweighs my opinion on the social norm of “African-American”. Thank you.

I wasn’t in class on Tuesday (very sorry, I was feeling pretty crappy) but I’ll try to answer the question the best that I can. The narrator’s invisibility in Invisible Man is both racial and general. Being Black is obviously disadvantageous in the narrator’s time and place. Being inferior and unimportant keeps one in the background. There wasn’t an uproar when a bunch of black teenagers were flung into a ring and made to duke it out for survival. You were to keep quiet and keep to yourself. Trueblood is a good example. Even though he raped his own daughter, he generally kept to himself and his farm. The white folk liked this, so they ignored his sin and gave him extra work anyway. The vet is a foil to this. He speaks his mind (from a true illness or not, I don’t know) and is in an insane asylum for it. An articulate white man is praised and thought of in the highest manner. A black man, however, is locked away to keep his words from doing harm. The vet displays the narrator’s invisibility to him and Mr. Norton. At the Golden Day, Mr. Norton tells the vet of his fate with the black college, and the vet tells Mr. Norton, “Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the scorecard or your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less – a black amorphous thing.” Mr. Norton does not care for the narrator personally. The narrator is just another example of his accomplishments, a “black amorphous thing” that says he’s done his part in the world. The narrator is invisible as an individual.

However, the narrator’s invisibility is created mostly by his perception of what being Black is. When he travels to New York City, he is baffled at how visible Blacks are in the north. He is stunned by a Black policeman, by the sheer amount of them on the streets. He couldn’t understand how there was a riot of Blacks going on in broad daylight. In Harlem, in New York, blacks were not as ignored. But the narrator chose to stay invisible himself, to keep his white-petting ways. The tactic of appeasing the white men, to staying out of there way was the only way he knew how to act from living in the south. He actually managed to change his visibility when he became involved in the Brotherhood, but even that was sprung upon him and not of his own initial will.