Discussion Posts – Page 11 – ENGL 25640 The Problem of Fictional Character

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Fictional identities in Invisible Man

I thought the section of chapter 23 in which the narrator is mistaken several times for Rinehart was very interesting to consider in terms of what we have been talking about character. It seems strange that only a pair of sunglasses and a hat are enough for so many people to think that the narrator is Rinehart, which seems to further cement his status as an “invisible man,” and also that Rinehart has so many of identities, including gambler, runner, and preacher. There is an inherent tension in how Rinehart is physically so identifiable, but his real identity is so fragmented, and consequently “invisible,” which makes him difficult to really understand. The narrator realizes that he is “both depressed and fascinated … [he] wanted to know Rinehart and yet … [he’s] upset because [he] knows [he doesn’t] have to know him, that simply becoming aware of his existence, being mistaken for him, is enough to convince [him] that Rinehart is real.” (498) I think this frustration could reflect on how we as readers must perceive fictional characters, in that we are limited in how deeply we can understand them by the fundamental disconnect between us and the inner lives of fictional characters.

The Dancing Doll in Invisible Man 18-22

January 22, 2018 / elliotk / 0 Comments

The dancing Samba doll in this set of chapters sets off the shooting with which the Invisible Man grapples to find meaning for the final part of this reading. The doll itself, however, has a specific meaning given by the Invisible man as demeaning. – we see recognition of symbols like this earlier in the text with the coin sorting iron figure in his room at Mary’s, and we are to understand through the horrified emotions and deep anger at the Samba doll scene that our protagonist recognizes that humiliation comes with these symbols. Throughout the Samba scene however, the narrator never directly says why the dancing slave doll is so offensive, instead using insights of the internal emotional state of the protagonist combined with our out of text context to let us craft together meaning in the symbol. The meaning of Tod Clifton’s actions therefore for us does not come completely from the text – it fundamentally relies on meaning we’ve already placed into the doll by knowing what it “is”. The causal chain is therefore supposed to continue from this – the doll is profane, so the action is profane. But this causal logic seen earlier in the text seems questioned by the Invisible man. In the previous reading, he says at the Brotherhood event, “was it that she understood that we resented having others think that we were all entertainers and natural singers? But now after the mutual laughter something disturbed me: Shouldn’t there be some way for us to be asked to sing?” (314) Can we make the symbol of a black man singing profane in this section? Can it become something else when approached correctly? And if so, can there be a situation where Tod Clifton is approaching selling the doll in a correct way? The invisible man doesn’t seem to think so – “I thought, seeing the doll throwing itself about with the fierce defiance of someone performing a degrading act in public, dancing as though it received a perverse pleasure from its motions” (431)” Just the doll dancing causes the problems for him.

Invisible Man’s Estrangement from Private Life

January 22, 2018 / aattie / 0 Comments

As the Invisible Man becomes more deeply involved with the Brotherhood and develops into a public figure, he isolates himself more and more from his private life. The narrator begins to conceptualize himself as having two conflicting selves, writing, “…there were two of me: the old self that slept a few hours a night and dreamed sometimes of my grandfather, and Bledsoe and Brockway and Mary, the self that flew without wings and plunged from great heights; and the new public self that spoke for the Brotherhood and was becoming so much more important than the other that I seemed to run a foot race against myself” (380). As the Invisible Man continues to work for the Brotherhood, he becomes further estranged from his private life and seems to search fruitlessly for a sense of belonging in his relationships with members of the Brotherhood. He seems eager to please them and projects relationships from his personal life onto them. When he receives the warning letter at the beginning of Chapter 18, he demands assurance that he is well-liked from Brother Tarp, and in the moments before doing so is shocked to find that he sees his grandfather in Brother Tarp’s eyes (384). He also searches for romantic and sexual fulfillment through his work with the Brotherhood, sleeping with a white woman who describes “emotional security” as one of the appeals of the Brotherhood. He even seems to view his continuing attachment to Mary as an obstacle to his work. When he “accidentally” finds himself walking towards her door, he breaks out in a sweat and hurries away, acting ashamed (427). This competition between the narrator’s two selves is an interesting aspect of the Invisible Man’s quest to know who he is.

Identification of self vs. larger organization (Brotherhood)

January 22, 2018 / Hana / 0 Comments

Amidst the various aspects of development that we see the narrator experience throughout the novel, one very interesting one is his relation to and identification with the entities surrounding him. Due to the fact that we are introduced to the character as a lone, almost disembodied figure, we are provided with the sense that the story is inevitably headed in the direction of some type of climactic future that is vastly different from the character’s past. Beginning with his loyalty and absolute determination to the university and moving to his devotion to the Brotherhood, we see a range of commitment that differs in both strength and underlying motive. I am most interested in this how these stages seem to affect the narrator’s situational behavior, such as his encounter with mistakenly calling two strangers in a bar “Brothers”. After being confronted by the two men, he confusedly thinks, “They didn’t sound drunk and I had said nothing to offend, and I was certain that they knew who I was. What was it?” (424) While this is not the first form of antagonism the narrator has faced, the disjointedness of the situation, in which he had become so far removed from individuals outside of the Brotherhood, demonstrates the skillful degree to which he can adapt to and identify with a group. Moving forward with the story, I would like to explore how this cyclic repetition of identifying with a larger mass and then breaking off with them provides the character’s personality depth and leads to his ultimate lone situation.

Unfolding of Invisible Man’s Character

January 22, 2018 / ingoldjr / 0 Comments

Throughout the reading for today’s class, I was struck by the number of times in which the Invisible Man recognizes his own shifting values and ideas. Following the revelation that Clifton has gone missing, the Invisible Man comments that it “was as though” he “had been suddenly awakened from a deep sleep” (422). This newly realized state is echoed later on, as the protagonist mentions that he feels as if he’s “been asleep, dreaming” (444), unaware of the impact that his involvement in the Brotherhood and Harlem would have. These particular moments of character revelation are strange, mainly because a future Invisible Man, and likely a much different character than the current one, is narrating the story. In this way, the reader is forced to juggle a variety of different invisible men, beginning with the “completed version” of the prologue and then transitioning with him from college to New York City to the Brotherhood, etc. I’m interested in how this complicated method of unfolding used by Ellison impacts the relationship between reader and character, if at all. In addition, I think it’s interesting to consider the factors that cause these character changes, as the majority seem to be external factors (like leaving college, joining the Brotherhood) that incite internal revelations.

Fictional Character’s Limited Point of View: The Mystery of Tod Clifton

January 22, 2018 / caitlin24538 / 0 Comments

Character Aspect: Limited Point of View

One aspect of all fictional characters is their point of view, a view that is necessarily limited by their very participation in the fictional narrative. This limited point of view means that there are things inside the narrative that they can see and know, and there are also things that they can never know. If the fictional character is not the narrator, or at least not the sole narrator, the reader is exposed to knowledge that the fictional character does not have. This creates a sympathy in the readers as they watch a character who is necessarily removed from themselves by this difference of knowledge. However, in some fictional works, such as Invisible Man, the main fictional character is the sole narrator. In this case, the reader knows only as much as the fictional character, and is left curious and confounded about the same things that the fictional character is not allowed to know. Thus, the reader emphasizes rather than sympathizes with the fictional character, as they are confused together, with the same level of knowledge.

For example, throughout Invisible Man, there is the constant feeling for both fictional character and reader that there are things going on, forces at work, that involve the fictional character, but about which neither he nor the reader is given the full story. This is the situation of the factory hospital where the invisible man is given electrotherapy. He is confused and we are confused because things are happening to him about which he was never given full disclosure. Thus, he only has part of the story, and due to his being our only source of information, so do we. The situation is similar with the disappearance of Tod Clifton. How he went from being a leader in the Harlem community to selling dolls on a street corner will never be known to us. The narrator wants to know how it happened, and we want to know how it happened, but he will never be in a position to find out, so neither will we.

Collection of Objects

January 22, 2018 / s_cohen / 0 Comments

Doing today’s reading, I noticed myself paying extra attention to the talismanic symbols with which the Invisible Man interacts. Some of these, like Brother Tarp’s mangled chain link, he elects to keep in his close possession. Others, like Mary’s shattered minstrel bank that he struggles to discard earlier in the book, seem to be thrust upon him. In this section, the protagonist’s relationship to the primary symbol, Clifton’s Sambo doll, is a bit more complex. At first he is appalled by it, and tries to defile it in the street, but ultimately, as it becomes linked with Clifton’s untimely death, it becomes symbolic of the inherently complicated consciousness of a black man. So, it is added to the Invisible Man’s collection, and when he is examining it at his desk, noticing the black, invisible string that makes it dance, he thinks, “It had grinned back at Clifton as it grinned forward at the crowd, and their entertainment had been his death…the life of a man is worth the sale of a two-bit paper doll” (435-436). Personal objects, and the agency with or without which they come into one’s possession, thus illustrate a projection of the static qualities as well as the development of literary character; one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Tod Clifton- Synecdoche or Metonymy

January 21, 2018 / alozieada / 0 Comments

“For they had the power to use a paper doll, first to destroy his integrity and then as an excuse for killing him. All right, so we’ll use his funeral to put his integrity together again…For that’s all he had had or wanted.” (Page 338-my version. Beginning of Chapter 21-For y’all. The memorial preparations scene.)

The internal logic/moral code (consistency) of the Invisible Man falls apart when looking at the stated quote because his perspective is unclear. Who is the we in this statement? Is it the Brotherhood, or is it the black community? Is he organizing this funeral as a Brotherhood member or as a black man? Because Brother Clifton left the organization and ended up selling Samba dolls- a clear affront to Brotherhood values-, there is no way that the Brotherhood would support this funeral, especially considering their stringent beliefs. The Invisible Man’s evoking of the politics to mediate/cope with his own anger and disgust of the situation points to a moment where the Invisible Man is using the politics (the Brotherhood’s approach) as his own personal therapy. He prepares the funeral under the banner of the Brotherhood; however, his actions are not very Brotherhood-like. The difference is important because to use Tod Clifton’s funeral for the Brotherhood would make Clifton’s death merely symbolic, or representational. A metonymy. Whereas if the Invisible Man is using the funeral for his and the community’s healing, Clifton would be seen as more a part of the black community. A synecdoche. The meaning of Clifton’s death unravels itself through the perspective that the Invisible Man has which- as the chapter continues- reflects his relationship with Clifton as both symbolic and material- the material and symbolic mutually co-constructing/deconstructing each other. The meaning of Clifton’s death becomes clearer as the internal logic/moral code becomes closely untangled.

An Old Man to Another

January 21, 2018 / Ashley / 0 Comments

The invisible man’s effort to get rid of his grandfather’s influence was visible from the beginning of the book, and so when he saw his grandfather in Brother Tarp — “Framed there in the gray, early morning light of the door, my grandfather seemed to look from his eyes.” (384) — he was so shocked that for a while he could not look into Brother Tarp’s eyes. His grandfather had been the invisible man’s model except that the former’s last words confused him deeply and became the source of his anxiety; Brother Tarp provided advice to help the invisible man steady his belief and confidence, yet he was not there when so many changes happened and the invisible man needed his help. Both people who had been chosen as a form of guides by the invisible man betrayed him, and the betrayal seemed to me to hint at something which the invisible man unconsciously rejected to consider. With brotherhood’s not-so-noble nature starting to reveal, I wonder if during the process the invisible man would start to examine his beliefs, and how could he reconcile his grandfather’s ideology to his own.

Blindness and Anger

January 21, 2018 / allene / 0 Comments

The buildup to the Brother’s story about sacrificing his eye is present throughout Chapter 22, culminating in the narrator’s proclamation starting on page 475 “he doesn’t see me. He doesn’t even see me. Am I about to strangle him? […] See! Discipline is sacrifice. Yes and blindness. Yes. And me sitting here while he tries to intimidate me. That’s it, with his goddam blind glass eye”. But before the eye or the notion of not being physically seen is even mentioned in the chapter, the narration is constantly littered with referenced to sight. They have “penetrating eyes” “eyes that were meant to reveal nothing” “eyes narrow” with suspicion and during the sarcastic rant Brother Jack “rubs his eyes”. The various characters language focuses on seeing or not seeing the crowd, and looking at each other’s reactions such as seeing Tobitt enjoy himself with the cigarette, but one recurring way they refer to sight is in knowledge and anger. Phrases like “there you see”, “didn’t you see” “now see here” etc., refer to understanding and knowledge, not literal sight, and they are frequently uttered when the characters are angry. The moments where they have more emotional, angry outbursts are filled with references to sight until the actual sight story is mentioned. The speech about not being able to physically see the narrator when they can’t see his point of view, and ending the argument and chapter with “I looked into his eye. So he knows how I feel. Which eye is really the blind one?” all pointed refer to these themes that were brought up in the prologue. It seems as though commenting on not seeing the other’s perspective is not enough to spark these feelings of invisibility in the narrator, they also always accompany scenes with anger, and the response isn’t just angry but violent. Here he thinks about strangling the brother and in the prologue he actually does strangle someone. Wherever there seems to be feelings of anger or violence, more emphasis is placed on “sight”

ENGL 25640 The Problem of Fictional Character

University of Chicago