In the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, we can see that the narrator believes that he is invisible to everyone around him. When the narrator realizes that he is invisible, he decides to give up everything and hides underground with 1,369 lights that are wired all over his ceiling and is adding more little by little. As the narrator walks through the streets, he encounters a white man that is completely oblivious to the narrator and starts to cursing at him, before the narrator was going to really hurt the white man, he realizes that the white man didn’t see him. Once the narrator sees the helpless white man’s picture on the Daily News he laughs because the white man was “mugged” by an invisible man. “Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death.” (pg. 7) The narrator keeps adding lights to his home to feel visible because while being above ground walking around, he knows that he is invisible and just a shadow walking through the streets.
In Chapter 1 we get a glimpse of the narrators high school graduation and the outcome of his speech for his graduation ceremony. Since the narrators speech moved many people, some people decided to have the narrator give another speech to the community’s leading white citizens. At the end of his speech, the white men award him a briefcase and pretty much demands the narrator to cherish the briefcase because later it will help him determine the fate of his people. The white people also give him a scholarship to the state college for black youth. Although the narrator does receive these gifts, this is just the beginning to why the narrator ends up underground.

A Writer’s Responsibility

 As writers we have a responsibility to produce work that carries a social conscious when delivering it into the public sphere. We should not only be imaginative, creative, and original but also responsible for what our writing contributes to the greater discourse of ethics, justice and race. Our open forums and public discourse of race, inclusivity and diversity strive to propel accurate and much needed representations of minorities in movies, TV shows and writing. In essence, media and published literary works are highly valuable not only consciously but also subconsciously, infiltrating our minds, both young and old.  The power of representation is significant as we have witnessed in minstrel shows and caricatures of African Americans and Natives. Literature has delivered its’ fair share of negativity, popularizing stereotypes, as the abolitionist book Uncle Tom’s Cabin can attest to. We form or reinforce opinions based on what we see at the movies, on TV and what we read. For this reason, Claudia Rankine insists of writers who ask, “can I write about another’s point of view?” to consider “why and what for, not just if and how?” A writer may wonder why they need to ask this question before writing from the perspective of an ethnically diverse character. To answer this question they only need to look at history and understand the long lasting effects of representation as good intended as they may have seemed. When writing it is important to consider the significance of a representation and the stereotype it might perpetuate. It is also important to consider the individuality of the character that isn’t entirely the person’s race. The character shouldn’t be used as a prop to be discovered by a white character for their own personal growth but rather represented as a human and an individual.

The problem with white authors writing about black or ethnically diverse individuals is what these characters symbolically represent within the text. Characters of color are often used to regale readers with the author’s perspective on the manner of race— to show that they are on the right side of things, which in essence can translate to the real life equivalent of “hey, I have a black friend”. In this sense, the author is telling us two things: that they are indeed aware of the history of oppression and hatred of black and brown bodies but at the same time have taken a narrative and reduced it to a superficial representation meant to convey their own feelings and not to deliver a greater message of racial inequality. So it is not that they don’t see race or that they don’t acknowledge the history but rather the race is used as a prop, a token of their own goodness. A writer can argue that creativity is stifled when we begin “policing” it in this manner and that imagination knows no race but rather desires to tell a story, to which Rankine would argue, “for that unknowable portion of the human mind is also a domain of culture—a place crossed up by culture and history, where the conditions into which we were born have had their effect”. As conscious individuals, writers have a responsibility to develop and portray characters of color as people and not solely as a mass representation of race.

It is not enough to simply be represented in a physical sense or even a historical sense but also necessary to develop the individual. Writers have to consider the reason for that character’s existence in a book—is it to develop this character as a complex individual with ancestors who suffered at the hands of racism or simply to have a one dimensional “black person” to check off a list of diversity? This is what Ellison’s character in the Invisible Man feels as a black man in a society dominated by white figures, “when they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me”(3). And what Hurston describes as the “first day I became colored”. Seeing one’s self singled out and viewed in a particular manner because of the color of your skin is a burden generations strong. The individual does not exist in racism, color and a history of attributions is all that matter. We cannot simply be “behind the writing” or believe that creativity and the imagination drive us blindly, we must be aware of the individuals we are creating through writing and how they resonate with readers and society at large.

I think that it is important to acknowledge that the power of imagination has undeniably produced some of the most impressive works of literature throughout history. Undoubtedly, without literary works we would not have some of the greatest stories ever told—rich in culture, history and understanding of the world that surrounded the author at the time. As writers aware of the real issues in our communities and the world, we have a duty not just to deliver our imagination and conscience to the public but also bring something with a greater message. As creators, we are responsible for representations and our characters. One way to be conscious of our writing is to ask, as Rankine suggests, why we want to write from the perspective of a Hispanic, African American, or Native American?  We need to focus on what our representations bring to the greater discourse of race, not just what our readers will think about our one-dimensional propriety about race.

Zora Neale Hurston, at the conclusion of her essay “How it Feels to be Colored Me,” presents her audience with a metaphor that almost seems out of place in the course of her assertions of pride and self-assurance. She tells us that “in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall.” This statement is especially at odds with the description of herself which precedes it, when Hurston refers to herself as “cosmic Zora.” Much of this essay, in fact, reads almost like a retort to work by African American writers who argue about all of the ways in which society makes it difficult for them to go about their lives and succeed to the same degree as white Americans. Frantz Fanon, in “The Fact of Blackness,” writes about the relegation to objecthood he feels he is subjected to under the attention of those who do not regard him as an equal. Hurston, in contrast, writes about how she watches those around her from her front porch, not how she is being watched, and how she came to discover that she was colored but not tragically so. And then, in the conclusion of her essay, she comes around to Fanon’s ideas.

Finally, Hurston, too, has been relegated to objecthood, and so the rest of her assertions must be called into question. With the introduction of the paper bag metaphor, Hurston brings the audience past the first layer of her personality, into the know about what feelings run deeper. Yes, she has the ability to strut through the world with her chin up, to act as though nothing touches her, but, as she seems to ask her audience, do you think it’s possible to be black in America and get through life without incurring wounds? Hurston tells us that in the main she feels like a brown paper bag. So, this is the normal state of her emotions.

And perhaps the bulk of the essay works not only to reassure Hurston herself, but to reassure her white audience as well. Surely, Hurston is not lying when she speaks of her pride, her happiness, the affirming experiences she’s had. But that cannot be all there is to the African American experience, though at first she makes it out to be. It is as though she is saying for the majority of the essay, don’t worry, racism isn’t so bad, there are those of us out there who are perfectly happy. This makes it all the more crushing in the end when her audience must come to find that even Hurston, who made herself out to be lighthearted all the time, feels as though she is nothing more than a paper bag filled with worthless objects.

The prologue and first four chapters of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison are filled with evocative and brutal imagery. The “us” vs. “them” racial dichotomy is often very visible. This dichotomy is illustrated when the narrator attacks a white man who insults him on the street, and when he is placed in a blind boxing ring, forced to fight other black men for the amusement of white onlookers. In Chapter Three, another similar moment is discussed by a former physician (dubbed “the vet”), now mental patient, who describes the unsettling dynamic between the invisible man and his white benefactor, Mr. Norton. In the following paragraphs, I will analyze the vet’s descriptions and explore the extent to which these two characters fulfill them.

On page 95, right after Mr. Norton is nursed back to health and is about to leave the Golden Day with the narrator, the vet proclaims he believes their arrival was “very fitting.” He  describes the pair as “poor stumblers” because “neither of you [them] can see the other.” This remark continues the idea that true sight is about seeing what lies beneath the color of one’s skin-seeing into one’s soul. The narrator describes himself as an “invisible man” because those around him usually only see his physical presence as a miscellaneous black man and fail to recognize his emotions and desires. These sight concepts are reminiscent of the ideas of double consciousness proposed by Du Bois and triple consciousness proposed by Fanon.

The vet says to Mr, Norton, “to you he is a mark on the scorecard of your achievement…a black amorphous thing.” Examining the way Norton speaks to the narrator, these conclusions are not extraordinary. Norton claims he sees the narrator’s fate as intertwined with his own because Norton was one of the founders of the black college, and the narrator’s success or lack thereof will reflect his own. The narrator initially fails to understand what Norton means by this, perhaps because he sees his own success as dependent on so many more factors than just a college education. With the world’s eyes seemingly disgusted by the sight of him, determined to make him run as if on a treadmill with no promised destination (as he dreams the letters in the gifted briefcase to proclaim), the odds are against him. One seemingly well-wishing white man cannot change this fate.

It is also notable that Norton urges the invisible man to read Emerson. This further emphasizes how out-of-touch Norton is with reality. As we have discussed in class, Emerson praises a return to nature, and with that, the ability to detach oneself from societal ties and become a “transparent eyeball.” However, many of the black writers we’ve read would argue that becoming a transparent eyeball is impossible when one is tied down by the implications of their race at all times. Norton likely does not understand that the narrator cannot relate to “rising above” social identity due to the depth of his struggles. One cannot escape societal ties when they have become an essential part of one’s identity and have to be considered in order to strategize social survival.

This strategy for survival is important to take into account when analyzing the extent to which the narrator fulfills the vet’s “automaton” characterization. The vet claims that the invisible man views Norton as a God-like figure, capable of immense funding and power and therefore demanding of the utmost respect. However, the vet has drawn these conclusions based on his observations, without verbal input from the narrator himself. The narrator is not a robot; he has complex thoughts but forces himself to perform as a monotonous servant in order to maintain his position at the college. Evidently, even the vet, a black man, has superimposed a deferent, slave-like narrative onto the relationship between Norton and the invisible man. Even the black characters in Ellison’s narrative fail to truly “see” the narrator.