Invisible Man: A Totalitarian Truth

For the final blog of the month, I wanted to use this space to take a deeper into some of the seminar notes I had come up with my our group’s presentation on Clifton-Riots from Invisible Man, which I felt I wasn’t able to voice very well due to time and well, a sore voice! Here, I want to look into the conversation, rather a key line, between Brother Jack and the Brotherhood against the Invisible Man following his speech at Clifton’s funeral, which is critical in bringing out some of Ellison’s finest commentary on the essence of the struggle between power and control. IM finds himself facing off against Brother Jack and the theoreticians of the Brotherhood, and in trying to explain himself to them Jack simply states, “If so, listen to me: you were not hired to think” (pg 469). Brother Jack’s words to IM are critical in understanding the nature of Ellison’s portrayal of manipulation and domination across the novel, which in essence is characterized by blind submissiveness. By saying that it is a blind submission and adherence is critical as well, as the idea of sight and blindness is also a key recurring thematic motif in the novel as well for this very reason. Looking at blindness in the novel, one only has to think of the two most prominent, the blind Reverend Barbee and the half-blind Jack, who find themselves literally impaired in their vision of what lies before them. However, with the IM, his blindness is found on a much more metaphorical level, as it is something that is impressed upon him by Jack and the Brotherhood, who would keep him blind to the outside world by making him out to a piece of clay, able to molded and sculpted into whatever they deem most fit or necessary for their circumstances. By IM saying that he is starting to think is, in the perspective of the Brotherhood, an attempted maneuver to undermine their authority and domination in IM’s attempt to try to mold himself and his own identity instead of having it all done for him by the Brotherhood. If one were to put it in more visual terms, IM is “Sambo the dancing doll, ladies and gentlemen. Shake him, stretch him by the neck and set him down,-He’ll do the rest. Yes!” (pg 431). IM is nothing more than a doll to the Brotherhood who by speaking out during the funeral essentially tried to voice his own opinion and pull his own puppet strings. Not only this, but it was IM’s attempt to bring himself out of the blindness of thought and to try to see for himself, something that the Brotherhood noted as being quite dangerous. From a historical standpoint, this is the greatest caution and fear within a communist government, as uniqueness of thought is an immediate deviation away from the Marxist doctrine that is supposed to be followed and obeyed with religious piety. This was why Stalin purged out millions of his own people during his early 1930s collectivization of Russia and why he held the Great Purge Trials of upper level Politburo members, a fear of an undermining of authority. Those in power will do whatever it takes to maintain that role of reality for them, willing to provide whatever illusion for the common people to believe and accept as their petty truth so that they may stay in control. Until now, IM has believed that Brotherhood illusion to be his own personal reality and self-identity while Jack maintains supremacy, but in truth, Jack’s powerful line to IM is a shattering moment of realization for IM, when he finally gets it, that he is but the servant, and Jack the master.

One

For this next blog, I wanted to accomplish two things: first, I felt from my last poetry blog on post-World War I disillusionment that I ought to explore that idea again here, and second, to explore the ideas of loneliness, isolation, and the conceptual conflict between truth and illusion as are constantly found in Invisible Man which we are currently studying in class. To accomplish both these tasks, I looked to the lyrics of Metallica once again, this time those of “One”, a dreary thrash ballad with a powerful message hidden behind the words. The song’s lyrics are based off of the 1939 novel, Johnny Got His Gun by David Trumbo, ironically written the same year of the breakout of the Second World War. The story follows a World War I soldier who is hit by a landmine and nearly killed but survives despite having lost his arms, legs, eyes, ears, and mouth, with his brain and mind kept perfectly intact, leaving him a prisoner of his mind. The impending result of such a horrendous atrocity of the war is a person who is trapped within himself, doomed to suffer from loneliness for the rest of his life, his only companion being his sporadic thoughts and dreams. The opening lyrics paint a chilling picture of the soldier’s condition, saying, “I can’t remember anything, can’t tell if this is true or dream, deep down inside I feel to scream, this terrible silence stops me”. Of these lines, the second about truth and dream, or rather what is and what seems, is what stood out to me, as like the anonymous narrator in Invisible Man, one of the greatest tragedies of life is not knowing how to tell the difference between the two, or worse, believing that a dream is the truth or vice versa. The disabled soldier is trapped in his own darkened mind, unable to experience the light of truth, and as a result can never know what is actually real. As the lyrics continue, it is revealed that there is one truth that the soldier knows: “There is not much left of me, nothing is real but pain now”. Pain, torment, and discomfort are the only truths that the soldier can ever identify with now because he has been denied everything that would have allowed him to experience any other sort of truth. Looking at this from a historical perspective, this is perhaps the greatest attribute of post-WWI disillusionment of the “Lost Generation”, that they had been exposed to what the world was really like. Four horrible years of a stalemated battle of trench warfare along the French border taught countless soldiers what life really consisted of, which was pain, suffering, and ultimately death. The chorus reveals the agony of what the war has brought on to the soldier, as he cries out, “Hold my breath as I wish for death, Oh please, God, wake me”. From a literary perspective, these lines are an interesting way to look at what the real nature of truth is. The soldier says “wake me”, alluding to him being caught within the illusion of his own mind as a result of his impairment, but if he were to be “awoken”, what would he wake up to? As countless other writers of the time like Hemingway and TS Eliot noted through their own works, the truth of the world that the soldier wishes to wake up to is not much better than the confines of his mind, as it is equally filled with pain, discomfort, and sorrow. Essentially, whether in the illusion of the mind or in the light of reality, there is no escape from pain, for it is a horror that plagues both imagination and reality. In a final analytical note, it is necessary to look at the line of the second chorus, “Now the world is gone, I’m just one”. Following the soldier’s failed suicide attempt after his tracheotomy and his denied request to be displayed on a tour to show people the physical atrocities of war, the soldier realizes that his destiny is in his hospital bed, the world essentially having past away from him and being the only “one” left. His fate is to fully experience isolation and loneliness, to never again be a part of the world, his only memory of it being of all the pain and suffering that it caused him. Ultimately, he will be “one” with torment and the bitter memories of the past. As the doctor puts it in the film, “This young man will be as unfeeling as the dead until the day he joins them”.

Invisible Man: A Crisis in Clifton

For this blog, after spending the past two days working on Invisible Man seminar research in class, I wanted to use the blog space to explore some points of analysis from the section my group was assigned for the assignment, which was looking at Brother Clifton’s fallout from the Brotherhood all the way to the final Chapter with the rioting in Harlem. More specifically, I wanted to analyze some of the comments that Anonymous makes to himself following Brother Clifton’s death after he resisted arrest, shot dead on the streets while selling the strange Sambo dolls. Perhaps before examining Brother Clifton himself, it is important to look at the Sambo dolls that he sells on the streets after going missing. In the words of Clifton, “Shake it up! Shake it up! He’s Sambo, the dancing doll, ladies and gentlemen. Shake him, stretch him by the neck and set him down, He’ll do the rest Yes! He’ll make you laugh, he’ll make you sigh” (Ellison. 431). The doll can easily be understood to be working as a foil to Anonymous and what the various elders and mentors of his life see him. The Sambo dolls are puppets, pulled by the strings of a puppet master in control and forced to do whatever it is told, with no thought given to what the puppet may want because the puppet is not actually human and therefore has no individual right to opinion or conduct of thought. In this way, Anonymous can very much be compared to being like the Sambo doll, constantly being pulled in various directions by the likes of Mr. Norton, Dr. Bledsoe, Brother Jack, and even Ras the Exhorter to a certain extent, all of whom refuse to acknowledge the individual identity of Anonymous since they know that his identity is linked to something greater than himself, and thus has no need for one. At this point in the novel, Anonymous does not so much identify his own personal manipulation by the Brotherhood and others in life, which will come following the Harlem riot realization, but correlates it more following Clifton’s brutal death as a fall out from history.  He reflects on the fallout saying, “I’d forget it and hold on desperately to the Brotherhood with all my strength. For to break away would be to plunge… to plunge” (Ellison. 435). Here, Anonymous refuses to look to Clifton’s death as a dreary foreshadowing to his own realizations about the Brotherhood, but instead backwardly uses it to solidify his own illusion of what the Brotherhood means to him. Anonymous is still desperate to maintain that the world that the Brotherhood shows before him is one of truth and reality, something Anonymous longs for following his first awakening after reading Dr. Bledsoe’s letter to Mr. Emerson, after which he promised himself to never let himself be manipulated again from the denial of truth. Yet here he is, with a new life and name within the Brotherhood, an organization that he has so much confidence in, he is willing to take on a new identity that is solely linked to it. In the opinion of Anonymous, Clifton fell out of history because he failed to identify with the history and truth that the Brotherhood had shown him, losing his identity and his life as a consequence. Anonymous is willing to do everything in his power to make sure that such a fallout does not happen to him, and in the process of doing this, he signs away what fragment of individual identity he may have had left by deciding to keep his parasitic relationship to the Brotherhood, something without which would kill him.

Killed Paive- July 8th 1918

For the first of my blogs this month, I decided to mix in some of what I’m learning in AP European History, the events surrounding the First World War, with my choice of a poem. For this month’s poem, I chose Ernest Hemingway’s poem Killed Paive-July 8^th 1918, one that heavily reflects on the perspective and attitude felt by many in the months before The Great War’s conclusion, which would leave an attitude of isolation and disillusionment, both of which would ultimately define the “Lost Generation” in the year to come. It is a bitter personal reflection, as Hemingway himself wrote this after being stationed in Paive, Italy in July 1918, a few months before the 11/11/1918 Armistice, and was an ambulance driver until he was severely wounded by a mortar shell. Hemingway begins his harrowing close-encounter with death with the opening lines, “Desire and all the sweet pulsing aches and gentle hurtings that were you”. Clearly, Hemingway is reflecting on who this soldier was as a person before he was ultimately found himself out on the front lines fighting a war. He reminds the reader of how each and every person who lost their life in the war isn’t just some number to be added to a long list of statistics, but a living, breathing, and amicable person, someone who had dreams and desires for how they wanted their life to be, just like any other person. Just like a person also they had their own heartaches and painful memories, but no matter how much we may not like to have these dreaded thoughts in our minds, it is what makes us all human, one of the key elements that helps to separate us away from mindless animals. The fact that Hemingway reminds us of just how human each and every soldier was is critical in regards to what he says next, “Are gone into the sullen dark”, because he now forces the reader to contrast the qualities of humanity with their absence. As the soldier finds himself nearing death, it is not just his body that will cease to exist, but who he was as a person as well. All the qualities of humanity, both the passionate desire for greatness alongside the pitfalls of pain and emotion, shall pass along into darkness and ceasing to exist. The final portion of the poem is a sad telling of the real event, in which when the mortar shell exploded, there was another soldier in between him and the shell, who was killed instantly while another had their legs ripped off. He hauntingly reflects on this experience by saying, “Now in the night you come unsmiling To lie with me A dull, cold, rigid bayonet On my hot-swollen, throbbing soul”. Hemingway’s lines here are a comparison between himself and the dead soldiers who now lie before him, seeing how cold and lifeless they have become in staunch comparison to his own pounding heart. Hemingway had a first-hand encounter with the atrocities of war, seeing how easily it consumes the lives of the soldiers forced to die on the front lines for a cause pressed onto them by their country. Even though the war would end in a few months, Hemingway knew from this moment onward that one can never really go back to how things were, and it seemed that through all the atrocities of war that he and everyone else in his generation felt a little less human in the years to come.