Invisible Man Essay: Race, Blindness, and Monstrosity -- Invisible Ma

Race, Blindness, and Monstrosity in Invisible humankind Id like to read Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man as the odyssey of one mans search for identity. Try this scenario the narrator is briefly an academic, then a factory worker, and then a socialist politico. None of these careers works bug out for him. Yet the narrators time with the so-called Brotherhood, the socialist group that recruits him, comprises a good deal of the novel. The narrator thinks hes found himself through the Brotherhood. Hes the next Booker T. Washington and the recent voice of his people. The work hes doing will finally garner him acceptance. Hes home. Its a nice scenario, but the narrator realizes his journey must continue when Jack, the leader of the Brotherhood Now compute here, he began, leaping to his feet to lean across the table, and I spun my chair half around on its hind legs as he came between me and the light, gripping the skirt of the table, sputtering and lapsing into a foreign language, c hoking and coughing and shaking his head as I balanced on my toes, set to propel myself frontward seeing him above me and the others behind him as suddenly something seemed to erupt out of his face . . . (Ellison, Invisible Man, 409). The careful bureaucracy gives way to rage he regresses, tongue and swearing in a foreign tongue, leaning forward as if to attack the narrator. And the eruption? Jack is a Cyclops, the one-eyed mythological giant of affright and lawlessness I stared into his face, feeling a sense of outrage. His left eye had collapsed, a line of raw redness showing where the lid refused to close, and his gaze had lost(p) its command. I looked from his face to the glass, thinking hes disem... ...Citizen is a rowdy drunk that no one listens to. Yet Jack is a brother, or, as Invisible Man puts it, the extensive white father. Hes not such an easy enemy to defeat, and the problem wont just go away. The map of racism, blindness, and monstrosity that Ellison draws is i ncomplete because the monster is never defeated. Perhaps this as well as is characteristically American. Ellisons evolved Cyclops has staying power. Hes grown resistant to the heros tricks and, though blind, he will thrive. Ellisons Odysseus is doomed to wander longer than eleven years. 1 This is the Gaelic word for nonsense. whole kit and boodle Cited Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York Random House, New American Library, 1952. Homer. The Odyssey, translated Richmond Lattimore. New York Harper Collins, 1991. Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York Random House, 1990.