The Angry Invisible Man
Throughout the first nine chapters of the Invisible Man, the narrator is never described as angry. He's forced to fight in a battle royale, listen to a sharecropper "embarrass the race" by telling his story of incest, see a man he thinks highly of (Mr. Norton) heckled and shoved around in a bar, but throughout this he's never described as angry. Mr. Norton gets angry. Dr. Bledsoe gets angry. The narrator never does. The first time he truly gets angry is in chapter 10 when he discovers Dr. Bledsoe has betrayed him. After this initial cataclysmic event, the narrator is forever changed.
The next big experience with something that could be called anger is in the paint factory. Yet again, every character around him gets angry. Before it was Norton and Bledsoe, now it's his boss and Brockway. This time however, instead of standing and accepting their anger, he fights back.
In my opinion, the most interesting event is when he's given a lobotomy. At first, he describes himself as not being able to feel anger. However, in the following days, he refers many times to the growing "black anger" inside of him. We can see it most notably when the old black couple is evicted. In that scene, though, he compels the crowd to stop. The narrator's black anger hasn't grown enough to overtake the meek and humble narrator that has been in control all his life. My question is, in what ways we see this anger grow? And how will this shape the narrator, his person, and his journey?
I thought this was a really interesting aspect of the narrator's development to focus on, and you did a nice job looking at how it changes over the course of the story. I think a lot of this change in the main character's reactions comes from the ways he begins to question the world around him. In the first chapters, he has the mentality that the world is set up in a certain way to put him at a disadvantage, but that the only way to combat that is to struggle his way up through a system trying to push him down. As he realizes just how impossible is for him to achieve success this way, though, we see him start to question the people around him and the pitfalls of a system that tries to "keep him running," and I think these emerging doubts contribute to the anger he begins to experience.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't thought about this aspect of the narrator much, and I think you bring up a really good point. I think his anger is a good way to gauge his development and his changing opinions. The narrator experiences a lot of inner turmoil because of what his grandfather said to him, and as well as his entire upbringing, training him to see white people as better. I think as he learns more about what his own views are and what is true and what isn't, anger will come to him naturally and I think it's interesting to see how the emotion will continue to affect him.
ReplyDeleteWhile there are definitely instances where the narrator gets irritated, and there are even more moments where he has every right to be angry, just like you said, he never does until a certain point pushes him off the edge. I think the reasoning behind that is probably the narrator's awareness of how other people may wrongfully perceive him if he gets angry. However, I can't help but wonder if this was also an intentional move by Ellison to make absolutely sure his main character could not be twisted into the "angry black person" stereotype.
ReplyDeleteI was thinking of this blog post in class today when we discussed the "Americana bank" episode in chapter 15, as the narrator's immediate reaction to seeing the racist bank is *anger* and he destroys it in a fit of rage. I definitely agree that increasing measures of righteous anger are a good sign in terms of the development of critical consciousness--the most galling thing about reading chapter 1 is the degree to which the narrator seems to accept the abuse. The reader wants so badly for him to at least silently question what is going on, but this is the reality he has been raised in, and he's been trained to accept it. One major arc of this book is that we see the "training" wearing off: he describes it in precisely this way when he starts to fight Brockway (admittedly not the best example of the narrator's righteous anger, as he's beating up an old man and knocking out his dentures, but in terms of the narrator's consciousness it's nice to see him resisting an authority figure).
ReplyDeleteYes, I definitely agree that the narrators anger is an interesting topic. As I had been reading I would recall the prologue, when the narrator was bumped into and basically got into a fistfight with the person who couldn't see him. I kept wondering, when will our narrator actually become like that? I couldn't imagine him fighting it out with someone on the street for a long time, but you're right, since the Bledsoe incident he has been growing closer and closer to being capable of reactive anger.
ReplyDeleteNice Post, Ella! I think that looking at anger is really interesting in the context of this book especially since Black people are often accused of being angry in a negative way. I think that with his anger has come more opposition. He has become more independent and understood the system more the angrier he gets.
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