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

Race, Blindness, and Monstrosity in Invisible Man Id worry to read Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man as the odyssey of one mans search for identity. examine this scenario the vote counter is briefly an academic, then a factory former, and then a socialist politico. None of these careers works out for him. Yet the narrators time with the supposed Brotherhood, the socialist group that recruits him, comprises a good deal of the novel. The narrator thinks hes effectuate himself through the Brotherhood. Hes the next Booker T. Washington and the new 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 up, the leader of the Brotherhood Now see 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 exhibit of the table, sputtering and lapsing into a foreign langua ge, choking and coughing and oscillation his head as I balanced on my toes, set to displace myself forward seeing him above me and the others behind him as suddenly something seemed to kindle out of his face . . . (Ellison, Invisible Man, 409). The careful bureaucracy gives way to irritation he regresses, spitting 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 terror and lawlessness I stared into his face, feeling a sense of outrage. His left eye had collapsed, a line of raw excitation showing where the lid refused to close, and his gaze had lost its command. I looked from his face to the glass, thought hes disem... ...Citizen is a rowdy drunk that no one listens to. Yet Jack is a brother, or, as Invisible Man puts it, the great white father. Hes non such an easy enemy to defeat, and the problem wont just go away. The subprogram of racism, blindness, and monstrosity t hat Ellison draws is incomplete because the monster is never defeated. Perhaps this too 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 goddamned to wander longer than eleven years. 1 This is the Gaelic word for nonsense. whole kit and boodle Cited Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. rude(a) 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.