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.

Hamlet: A Fascinating Finale

My last blog for this month comes on the same day that we finished reading Shakespeare’s Hamlet in class, so I felt for this blog that it would be good to share some of my initial thoughts to the dramatic and tragic conclusion of the play, and also look into what it has to offer to many of the underlying themes and motifs that have been developed over the course of the five Acts. Within Act V scene ii, the final act of the play, the described deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the actual deaths of Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, and Hamlet himself are witnessed, but there is still plenty of room to analyze for greater meaning behind each of the characters’ words and actions. Perhaps one of the most prominent moments is between Hamlet and Horatio before he goes off to exchange in dual with Laertes, in which Hamlet confides to his guard of him feeling the inevitable nature of his death to come and his readiness to accept this new course that Fate itself has set before him. Hamlet reflects, “But it is no matter…it be now, ‘tis not to come, if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come…let be” (V.ii.227…234-235...237). It is interesting to note here the demeanor and perspective with which he approaches death, something he has reflected upon in the past with fear and dread of the mysterious future that would await. Before destroying his relationship with Ophelia, Hamlet reflected on his views of death as “the dread of some undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns” (III.i.86-87). Now, as he prepares to meet his destiny, he has an unusual calmness to him, seeming to accept himself and his fate willingly despite whatever death may have in store for him. Perhaps the greatest reason behind this is from the final line of the quote, “let be”, which seems to serve as an answer to the timeless question that Hamlet himself raised of “to be or not to be”. Over the course of the entire play, Hamlet has struggled with this conflict, going back and forth between “seeming” to be a man of insanity and irrationality while masking who he actually “is”, a man of integrity and wisdom. Now, as he prepares to meet his death, Hamlet comes to terms with himself and decides that if this is to be his end, he would himself die as the Hamlet that he knows himself to be and not what others may think or wish him to be. Hamlet hit upon the great fact of the “seem” vs. “is” argument, which is that ultimately the truth overcomes the illusion, but what remains the critical factor was the extent of the illusion and the damage that it has done to those involved. Hamlet sees now, before his mother, uncle, and Laertes even die, that time of “seem” must come to an end, that the walls of suspicion, lies, deceit and treachery that have stood as the crux and foundation of the entire play must all come crashing down if the kingdom is to be restored to its former state and liquidated of all that is “rank”. It is only fitting that all those whose actions inadvertently caused the state to deteriorate to where it is at the end are all dead, leaving only Horatio, perhaps the only man to act out of true reason, alive to tell the tragic tale. Hamlet’s purge of rankness in the kingdom would claim his own life as well, and leave the kingdom open to a man untainted by the poison of the previous kingdom, perhaps in the hopes that a new one can be rebuilt and be fruitful and the memory of the time of the rankness of Denmark be forgotten.

Master of Puppets

After having read through the first three acts of Hamlet and having to search for various recurring themes and motifs that Shakespeare inserts that help bring about a greater meaning of the work itself, I found that one of the key recurring ideas of the play is that of struggle of power and the manipulation of people in various circumstances to make them work to satisfy some sort of personal gain. With this thought in mind, I immediately thought of the lyrics to Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” as being of large relevance to this idea, since this song, along with every other song on the album, lyrically focus on the ideas of the loss of control and the abuse of power, both of which can be easily identified within the context of Hamlet as well. The song most explicitly explores manipulation and the struggle for control of one’s own fate in the context of drug abuse, making it very clear from the beginning what the real danger is behind letting substances like these become the driving force of one’s life. After a blistering iconic introduction, James Hetfield fiercely opens with the lines, “End of passions play, crumbling away, I’m your source of self-destruction”. From the beginning, it is made very clear just how real and terrifying drug addiction really is, and ultimately how scary the idea of becoming a slave to something against your will can really be. And while the lyrics may only seem to cover the pitfalls of substance abuse, they in fact can be applied to life itself, how it is that so many people find themselves pulled in various directions by fate and forces outside their control. The ‘strings’ of fate that pull people against there are directly identified in the chorus, “Master of puppets I’m pulling your strings, twisting your mind and smashing your dreams, blinded by me you can’t see a thing, just call my name because I’ll hear you scream”. With these lines, it is impossible not to think of the cover of the album, which shows a line of crosses in a cemetery, each with strings on them which are being held by two hands coming down from the sky. Every person in life likes to believe themselves to be their own ‘master of puppets’, believing in the idea that they can control their destiny or even manipulate others and pull on someone else’s strings. But in reality, we are all slaves to a master of some sort, destined to have our lives determined by a force that will consume our lives until the day we find ourselves resting below a cross in a cemetery. Each person has a different master, like the song describing how drugs ultimately consume a person’s life until death, forever destined to both hate their slavery to this materialistic master, yet loving the temporary pleasure it gives. This idea is represented musically in the song, as it is unabashed heavy riffs until the middle of the song, where it recedes into the melodic and somewhat classical bridge. Perhaps this is a representation of the drug addict having tried to free himself from the tumult that comes alongside being a slave to drugs, and stops using them for a while. But as the intensity and anger builds back up again in the song, it is apparent that there can be no true freedom while under the oppressive rule of the master, and it isn’t long until the song returns to full intensity and thus the power of the puppet master returns with full force. The victim screamed out in agony to the puppet master, “Fix me!” returning back to the drugs that keep him a slave to the master. As the puppet is under full control of the master, he is susceptible to whatever the master wants, seen through the lines, “I will occupy, I will help you die, I will run through you, now I rule you too”. These lines allow for the inference that the puppet reached a full point of being consumed by the master, so much that it was unable to retain a separate life of its own, and as a result died to become part of the master. Such is the fate of all people tied to their personal masters, destined to be consumed by forces that they cannot control which came about as a result of their own actions. Perhaps this is why the song ends with sinister laughter, as the dead puppet is mocked for having created the ties to the puppet master in the first place.

Hamlet: The Art of Illusion

Over the course of a rather hectic week between snow storms and a 4-day weekend, I worked in some time to read through Act III of Hamlet, which essentially consisted of Hamlet destroying all bonds of affection between himself and Ophelia, the performance of the play which mimics Claudius’s killing his brother the king, Hamlet’s scathing remarks to his mother and in his rage killing Polonius, and finally Claudius and his futile attempt to pray to God to forgive his sins. While there are obviously several different places to pick apart the key analytical points of the four scenes and bring out a “so what” toward the overall meaning of Shakespeare’s work, I wanted to focus on the continued motif of the play and the stage in this Act, found in Scene 2 where Hamlet is lecturing one of the players about the execution of his upcoming performance. By observing Hamlet’s criticism of what it means to “seem” the role of a player upon the stage, there is subtle insight into the protagonist’s own mind as he struggles to fight off his inner demons and carry out his own performance of madness for Ophelia, Gertrude, and everyone else he comes into contact with. He begins his criticism by telling the player to “o’erstep not the modesty of nature” (III.ii.20-21). While ‘nature’ most often finds its context in either describing the outside world, here it takes on two other refreshingly different meanings, and while Hamlet gives these instructions to someone else, they actually better reflect the young Prince himself. Here, ‘nature’ can be better connoted to mean a combination of qualities that make up the identity of a human being. With this new understanding, Hamlet seems to be telling the player to not overstep his own boundaries as a person, something that reflects on Hamlet, who also finds himself as a player over the course of the play. It seems here that Hamlet is inadvertently attempting to tell himself how he needs to be careful in his own acting, as to not go over the line in which he loses sense of who he is. Perhaps he partially feels himself losing control of this aspect, having just harshly condemned his past lover Ophelia to a nunnery, he must struggle to keep his own self in check. ‘Nature’ also has a theological connotation, dealing with a state of being in which there is a lack of grace. Again, this idea can applied to Hamlet’s situation as in his act of “seeming” to be someone that he really isn’t, he must be wary to not cross any religious lines with himself. We have seen this before, with God being the only thing that holds Hamlet back from killing himself, and we see it later in scene 3, where Hamlet has the opportunity to strike down Claudius when he appears to be praying, but refuses “to take him in the purging of his soul” (III.iii.90). In this way, Hamlet reveals how he rather difficultly continues to maintain his own personal moral compass in his act of illusion. In final thought, Hamlet’s instruction to the player is layered with an insight onto the purpose of acting itself, which he describes by saying, “from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her [own] feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (III.ii.21-26). Hamlet entreats the player to what he believes to be the very point and purpose to what both of them are taking part in, which is to use illusion to both criticize and reflect upon the current state of reality. What is perceived to be false can mirrored and reflected to reveal truth. Here Hamlet inadvertently reminds the audience why he is doing what he is doing, not just with the play conducted by the players, but the entire façade of madness that Hamlet has been acting out since his interaction with the ghost. Hamlet has the desire to take the essential elements of the world that is around him (nature) and remind everyone what it really is. It is somewhat of a ‘fight fire with fire’ mentality, casting off the illusions of what reality is by creating an alternate one, but it serves the point to reflect a true state of being. That is what Hamlet’s goal is with the play-within-a play about to be put on, and it is also what his goal is with his own personal illusion of madness.