African American Lit

     Power is key theme throughout Invisible Man. Even in the very beginning - the prologue where the narrator descibes his life as an invisible man, he talks about draining power from the city and pouring it into 1369 lightbulbs in his little secret apartment. In this situation he's stealing power, from presumably white people.     The balance of power between the white people in charge and the narrator is made obvious in almost every interaction in the book. The scene where he has to box people for entertainment then gives a speech to this crowd which they barely pay attention to and laugh at, for example. Driving Mr.Norton around, interacting with the factory owners and other workers, etc.      Barbee and especially Dr.Bledsoe also have power. They're important figures in their community who people look up to. They're rich, etc... Yet this is not the same type of power that the white men the narrator interacts with have. This power is subservie...

     In this blog post I wanted to talk about the title Native Son. When first hearing about the book I thought this was a strangely vague name, and looking it up on any library catalog resulted in an abundance of books with titles in some way relating to sons or nativism. Even while starting the book I didn't really make the connection - I mean Bigger was a son, I guess, but that couldn't possibly be the reasoning behind the title.       After finishing the book, the most obvious reason I could find is that Wright is trying to express Bigger's actions being predetermined and this whole situation arosing because of his environment and how he grew up. If this is true then the title is directed at American society; Bigger is a native son of the country - a black man born and raised in America, and a product of all the different forces and systems explored throughout the book. We discussed a lot of these in class - the police system, judicial system, ineq...