Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

I remember that I am invisible and walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.

(Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy.)

And beneath the swiftness of the hot tempo there was a slower tempo and a cave and I entered it and looked around and heard an old woman singing a spiritual as full of Weltschmerz as flamenco, and beneath that lay a still lower level on which I saw a beautiful girl the color of ivory pleading in a voice like my mother's as she stood before a group of slave owners who bid for her naked body, and below that I found a lower level and a more rapid tempo and I heard someone shout: "Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is the 'Blackness of Blackness.' "

How pain, shared memory, and history subtly infiltrate music

All dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all.

Woah

"Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open."

Then in my mind's eye I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.

Why is a bird-soiled statue more commanding than one that is clean?

But at the same time I was puzzled: How could anyone's fate be pleasant? I had always thought of it as something painful. No one I knew spoke of it as pleasant -- not even Woodridge, who made us read Greek plays.

They became silent, their faces clouding over, their features becoming soft and negative, their eyes bland and deceptive.

How black ppl instantly regarded whites

something like envy

?

There I was, tryin' to git away with all my might, yet having to move without movin'. I flew in but I had to walk out. I had to move without movin'.

First she was tryin' to push me away and I'm tryin' to hold her down to keep from sinnin'.

? Like if they dont acknowledge it, it didnt happen?

"Here," he said, extending a banknote. "Please take this and buy the children some toys for me."

White man being helpful again after his deed

Already he is -- well, bless my soul! Behold! a walking zombie! Already he's learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He's invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir! The mechanical man!"

I wanted to stop the car and talk with Mr. Norton, to beg his pardon for what he had seen; to plead and show him tears, unashamed tears like those of a child before his parent; to denounce all we'd seen and heard; to assure him that far from being like any of the people we had seen, I hated them, that I believed in the principles of the Founder with all my heart and soul, and that I believed in his own goodness and kindness in extending the hand of his benevolence to helping us poor, ignorant people out of the mire and darkness.

I sat thinking of the dread possibility of having to leave all this, of being expelled; imagining the return home and the rebukes of my parents.

Seems to be a recurring fear for some reason

A man of striking ugliness; fat, with a bullet-head set on a short neck, with a nose much too wide for its face, upon which he wore black-lensed glasses.

Then down into the earth; back to the ancient dust; back to the cold black clay . . . mother . . . of us all."

Down the sloping lawn below me the male students moved toward their dormitories, seeming far away from me now, remote, and each shadowy form vastly superior to me, who had by some shortcoming cast myself into the darkness away from all that was worthwhile and inspiring.

Shadow and insecurity vs intro with lightbulbs

Lights began to appear in the girls' dormitories, like the bursting of luminous seeds flung broadside by an invisible hand.

"Ordered you?" he said. "He ordered you. Dammit, white folk are always giving orders, it's a habit with them. Why didn't you make an excuse? Couldn't you say they had sickness -- smallpox -- or picked another cabin? Why that Trueblood shack? My God, boy! You're black and living in the South -- did you forget how to lie?"

"Please him? And here you are a junior in college! Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie! What kind of education are you getting around here? Who really told you to take him out there?" he said.

"Listen to me, boy," he said loudly. "Norton is one man and I'm another, and while he might think he's satisfied, I know that he isn't! Your poor judgment has caused this school incalculable damage. Instead of uplifting the race, you've torn it down." He looked at me as though I had committed the worst crime imaginable.

These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so well that it becomes the truth; and if I tell them that you're lying, they'll tell the world even if you prove you're telling the truth. Because it's the kind of lie they want to hear . . ."

"You're nobody, son. You don't exist -- can't you see that? The white folk tell everybody what to think -- except men like me.

after you win the game, you take the prize and you keep it, protect it; there's nothing else to do."

Battle royal symbolism ?

Truth, truth, what was truth? Nobody I knew, not even my own mother, would believe me if I tried to tell them. Nor would I tomorrow, I thought, nor would I . . .

You don't want to go home to be humiliated, I understand that, because you have some vague notions about dignity.

Why is dropping out/expulsion the worst possible outcome?

How had I come to this? I had kept unswervingly to the path placed before me, had tried to be exactly what I was expected to be, had done exactly what I was expected to do -- yet, instead of winning the expected reward, here I was stumbling along, holding on desperately to one of my eyes in order to keep from bursting out my brain against some familiar object swerved into my path by my distorted vision.

Should have followed grandfather's advice?

grandfather

BOOM!!!

"Good-bye," he said. His hand was large and strangely limp.

Did he bitch him?? Yessuh him to death?

When I met the big men to whom my letters were addressed I would put on my best manner. I would speak softly, in my most polished tones, smile agreeably and be most polite;

"But you're up North now," I told myself, "up North." Yes, but suppose she had screamed . . . The next time I used the subway I'd always be sure to enter with my hands grasping my lapels and I'd keep them there until I left the train. Why, my God, they must have riots on those things all the time. Why hadn't I read about them?

I recalled my expulsion, feeling quick anger and attempting to suppress it immediately; but now I was not quite successful, my resentment stuck out at the edges, making me uncomfortable.

a Yankee cracker!

Starting to hate whites

had come up simply to get a cold pork chop sandwich.

Funny bc earlier he gets angry that man assumes he likes pork chops and gets toast

My mind was blank, as though I had just begun to live.

I would do the work but I would be no one except myself -- whoever I was, I would pattern my life on that of the Founder.

Still it was nothing new, white folks seemed always to expect you to know those things which they'd done everything they could think of to prevent you from knowing.

"These I got lets through the grounds along with the coffee, the good with the bad. I don't know though, even with the best of filters you apt to find a ground or two at the bottom of your cup."

Feels symbolic

Three white men and three black horses.

I watched them, feeling very young and inexperienced and yet strangely old, with an oldness that watched and waited quietly within me.

Same watchful eyes of grandfather inside him?

I stumbled in a stillness so complete that I could hear the gears of the huge clock mounted somewhere on the balcony gnawing upon time.

What had an old slave to do with humanity?

Our task is that of making ourselves individuals. The conscience of a race is the gift of its individuals who see, evaluate, record . . . We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We will have created a culture. Why waste time creating a conscience for something that doesn't exist? For, you see, blood and skin do not think!"

"More human" . . . Did I mean that I had become less of what I was, less a Negro, or that I was less a being apart; less an exile from down home, the South? . . . But all this is negative. To become less -- in order to become more? Perhaps that was it, but in what way more human? Even Woodridge hadn't spoken of such things. It was a mystery once more, as at the eviction I had uttered words that had possessed me.

Hmm

Say what the people want to hear, but say it in such a way that they'll do what we wish."

Speaks so controllingly and power hungry

And it occurred to me that cleared of its ramshackle fences and planted with flowers and grass, it might form a pleasant park.

!?!?!?!?

Between us and everything we wanted to change in the world they placed a woman: socially, politically, economically. Why, goddamit, why did they insist upon confusing the class struggle with the ass struggle, debasing both us and them -- all human motives?

All our work had been very little, no great change had been made. And it was all my fault. I'd been so fascinated by the motion that I'd forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth. I'd been asleep, dreaming.