Life of a chaosbringer
The narrator travels across plenty of ground in Invisible Man: from college to Liberty Paints to the streets of Harlem. He is one of thousands (at least) in each of those respective environments, and yet, every time something catastrophic happens, he is at the center of it. Now, from a reader's standpoint, this is a very good thing: so many incidents happening! Very fun!
But from a logical standpoint, this makes no sense. How is it possible that this guy is the catalyst for so many events? And these aren't just small accidents, either-- from the illness of a major investor to the literal explosion at the paint factory, everything that he kickstarts just happens to be an extremely damning occurrence. So why? Why is this dude the Leviathan all of a sudden?
Before we can properly answer that question, we need to look at some of the problems he's caused. First, the disastrous road trip with Mr. Norton: He comes to the college hoping to see the fruits of his financial labor, and the narrator is given express orders to make everything run smoothly. Do not freak him out, do not show him something that will make him question the ideologies of the university.
So what does he do?
The very next minute?
He drives him to the house of a less fortunate black man with a story of how he accidentally had relations with his daughter. Then, he drives him to the chaotic Golden Day and brings him inside a building full of rowdy mental facility patients, who then proceed to beat a man basically to death.
Oops.
Hopefully you get where this is going. The college the narrator is enrolled in, a college in which the narrator seemingly has no meaningful learning experiences besides The Norton Incident, is an establishment bent on the "betterment and advancement" of black people. However, their definition of enrollable students is very narrow, and the narrator accidentally reveals that to Mr. Norton by showing him all the unfortunate situations directly outside of the college's campus. Not to say that the college should have enrolled, say, the medic from the Golden Day, that's not the point. The point is Bledsoe (And the Founder himself, to an extent) has spent years building a facade of a benevolent establishment, one that presents itself as a benefactor and educator to black people, yet you don't even have to drive a mile out from the campus to find people that needed help and didn't get it.
Ok, but what about Liberty Paints? Well, this one is a little more clear-cut. Liberty Paints is a metaphor for society (we truly do live in one) that covers up the achievements and efforts of black people and uses it instead to paint a picture of white excellence. Pun intended. There is literally a black man in the basement making the magic serum that makes Optic White so effective, and said serum gets mixed in to make a blindingly white paint. Brockway cannot take a day off or retire because his job is so important, yet he seems to be getting paid pennies while the white men who run it are making bank. So when the narrator shows up and blows up a vat full of that serum, injuring himself and also seemingly putting the factory out of commission for a while, he's burning down another establishment that is willfully ignorant at best and full-on racist at worst.
The narrator in this book talks about societal enlightenment and finding himself, and it just so happens that his awareness of the institutions stacked against him causes major accidents in places that uphold those same racist ideals. So he's not just perpetually unlucky; if anything, he's luckier than most, consistently getting the chance to tear down industries that seek to stifle him and other black people's wants and needs.
This was a super interesting discussion of what makes the narrator of Invisible Man stick out in the environments he finds himself in, and you brought up a lot of points I hadn't considered! One thing that makes this dynamic of the narrator constantly getting himself into these situations so interesting is that (at this point in his life, anyway) he seems like the last person who'd want to rebel against these establishments, and in fact, his unquestioning commitment to them is one of his defining characteristics early in the book. These incidents (particularly the scenes with Mr. Norton), often crop up precisely because the narrator is trying so hard to conform to these powerful establishments, and he's unwittingly bringing them down by doing so. In this way, we see echoes of the grandfather's words in the narrator's life: despite his efforts, his allegiance to these systems is what ends up precipitating their destruction.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny--I typically think of the accident at the end of chapter 10 as something that happens only to the narrator, as it is what lands him in that weird "factory hospital," where they seem perfectly set up to treat industrial accidents with frontal lobotomies and experimental shock therapy. It does seem to fit in with his increasing paranoia, that he is never quite acting on his own behalf but inadvertently following others' interests and intentions. But you make a good point that his very presence in the factory is disruptive, basically everywhere he steps. If the factory is "society," then our narrator is indeed a kind of chaos-bringer--and when you think about the way he describes the "advantages" of invisibility in the prologue (as he's literally "stealing power," a kind of silent ongoing "chaos"), it does seem connected to the subversive potential of invisibility.
ReplyDeleteI love the connections you make between Bledsoe and Brockway, and how the narrator ties into both of their stories. You can see the narrator growing a critical consciousness by looking at his two very different reactions he had when initially encountering both of these characters.
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