pov
Invisible Man is written entirely from the perspective of someone we know neither the credibility nor even the name of.
First I want to address the fact that we don't have any sources to corroborate any part of his story. In class some people brought up that it's hard to believe some of the later crazier and fantastical events actually happened. It's implied that the story is some kind of memoir, or at least written in the future, which brings up the question whether the narrator is remembering everything correctly. What about when the doctors at the factory did something to his memory - it feels like that should have had some effect on the way he remembers his past? Even aside from the unrealistic moments, is he twisting events to match how he felt during them? Or are the ideas he develops later about his life and experiences affecting them? During the narrative he often includes omniscient from the future remarks about his blindness in that moment. This makes me think that he might also be adding less obvious changes to the story to make it appear the particular way he sees it after the fact.
The whole story seems like a series of disconnected events - it's hard to believe the Narrator becoming part of the brotherhood and giving speeches for them is part of the same story as the factory and the fight in the beginning and Mr.Norton listening to Jim Trueblood's story. It seems as though as we go along there are more and more loose ends and characters we never see again or big life altering events that never get addressed again. It's very different from any other book I've read. It seems like most of the narrative comes from the Narrator's character development and how these events shaped it rather than from a sequence of logically successive moment. The conflict-climax-resolution happens not in the story itself instead in the Narrator's brain; primarily how he sees the world and his place in it.
This makes the nameless part of this character even more interesting - why would Ellison choose to keep something that's usually so important about an integral part of the book secret? It could be because he's trying to play even more into the idea of invisibility - in that an unnamed protagonist is basically anonymous and by extension invisible, or that nobody really sees his real identity, not even knowing his real name. Yet in this case I don't really understand why Ellison would choose to also keep the narrator's fake Brotherhood name secret if that's not part of his true identity. The choice could have something to do with trying to keep the focus of the book on the Narrator's experiences and not the particular facts about him, or trying to allow his experience to appear more universal in the readers' minds.
I felt the same way while reading this book -- I felt like it was just a sequence of events, and that I never really learned much about the narrator himself since he was just describing event after event. I think your claim that he could be fabricating or exaggerating many of these retellings is definitely possible. Maybe he's using these fantastical stories as a way for the reader to get to know his personality without actually telling us much about how he feels.
ReplyDeleteI thought your point about how the book is made up of disconnected events and lots of characters we never see again was really interesting. To me, this makes it a lot harder to understand each scene in the context of the entire book. And I agree that the arc of the story is really untraditional. I am also confused about why we never learn the narrator's name. I kind of thought it was Ellison's way of saying that the narrator's experiences don't necessarily have an identity tied to them, meaning many people have had similar experiences.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that most of the events in this book felt like a series of different stories that were even dreamlike at times. This structure made it a little difficult for me to figure out how everything was connected, but each "story" seems to be tied to the book through the narrator's development. In this regard, even if the narrator's memory of his past isn't completely accurate, the book is still successful in depicting all the factors of his environment that shapes him into an invisible man.
ReplyDeleteI've also been questioning the reliability of this narrator. He was forcibly lobotomized and came out the other side fine? It seems like he experiences so many traumatic events but retains no long-term damage from them. Of course if these events are from his point of view, he may not see himself as damaged at all afterwards. However, I do think there's a reason for all these intense events with little repercussions. Definitely something to think about.
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