The narrator’s grandfather is a constant presence in Invisible Man because of some advice he gave on his deathbed. He tells the invisible man, “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open” (16). These are the words to which the narrator returns over and over again, at first questioning whether or not his grandfather truly lived by this doctrine and then applying his own behavior to it, finding himself again and again agreeing and going along with whatever authority he finds himself subject to no matter the circumstances.

In the Brotherhood, the narrator has no trouble conforming at first. He seems to truly believe in the Brotherhood’s mission, and so when he is sent downtown to work on women’s rights, for example, he decides not to question it but to trust that he is still doing valuable work. Of course, he eventually discovers the truth about the Brotherhood, and he sees his role in their organization for what it really was. “[…] I no hero, but short and dark with only a certain eloquence and a bottomless capacity for being a fool to mark me from the rest; saw them, recognized them at last as those whom I had failed” (559).

So, the narrator failed the people of Harlem, and he likely failed his grandfather too. Throughout the novel, the invisible man finds many people to whom to look up. Bledsoe and Mr. Norton, his bosses at the paint factory, and of course the leaders of the Brotherhood all have a hand in shaping the narrator’s behavior. But as we discover throughout the course of the novel, none of them have his best interests at heart. Perhaps his grandfather was the only one who really did, and yet he was also the one the invisible man regards as the least credible. At the end of the novel, the narrator goes back to really examine what his grandfather might have meant. “Could he have meant—hell, he must have meant the principle, that we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men, or at least not the men who did the violence” (574). The principle, the narrator thinks, is greater and better than the men.

This is likely true about the Brotherhood. Their purported principles, like the ones America was built on, sounded great. On the surface, they fought for equality and they fought for peace. But their words and the narrator’s speeches were not enough to mean the organization was really working for the betterment of society. If the narrator had looked at his grandfather’s words more closely earlier in the novel, maybe he would have been able to agree them to death and destruction. The success of their purported ideals would surely have meant their death and destruction, because the black community would have been uplifted and given an equal platform on which to oppose the Brotherhood. The narrator can’t figure out whether or not his own death is tied to theirs. But their destruction might be worth the risk.

In the prologue to Invisible Man, we are introduced to the narrator we assume we will meet again at the conclusion of the novel— one who walks through the world under a sort of cloak of invisibility, comfortable in a solitude he must know from years of experience will remain intact no matter how many people come near him. For most of the novel, the man with whom we are acquainted is far from invisible. Though he is always sure to show deference to those above him in status, he constantly finds himself in situations where he is forced to assert his presence. An invisible man could not be expelled from college or fired from a job, for he would always escape the notice of his superiors. Yet our narrator has both of these experiences. Our narrator seems not to come into contact with invisibility until about a third of the way into the novel, when he arrives in New York.

The first description of New York that appears in Invisible Man is of the subway. Straight off the bus, the invisible man gets on a subway to Harlem. Here, he is overwhelmed by the crowd. “Moving into the subway I was pushed along by the milling salt-and-pepper mob, seized in the back by a burly, blue-uniformed attendant about the size of Supercargo, and crammed, bags and all, into a train that was so crowded that everyone seemed to stand with his head back and his eyes bulging, like chickens frozen at the sound of danger” (157-158). Looking back at the prologue of Invisible Man, it seems fitting that the narrator’s first taste of invisibility should be in a crowd. There he says, “It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. Then too, you’re constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision” (3-4). It would be logical to think that one who is invisible would be completely isolated from society. But Ellison shows us from the beginning that his narrator finds himself unseen mostly when surrounded on all sides by people. He sees it when he bumps into people, just as one does all the time on a crowded subway. At first, the narrator is mostly wary of this ability to escape notice.

Ellison’s simile about people on the subway, “like chickens frozen at the sound of danger,” reflects the fear the narrator feels at being in such close contact with so many people. He finds himself pressed against a woman and fears the accusation he is sure will come, and the prejudice which will ensure her word will be believed over his own. But instead, the narrator finds himself protected by a sort of invisibility. “[…] when I took a furtive glance around no one was paying me the slightest attention. And even she seemed lost in her own thoughts” (158). In this instance, in the narrator’s eyes, not just he but everyone is a chicken, and everyone is invisible. The crowd is just as insignificant and vulnerable as he is. It must be later that he acquires an invisibility which, rather than putting him on common ground with everyone else in New York, forces him into a solitude with which he makes peace. At its outset, the narrator’s experience with invisibility inspires only fear. So, invisibility is something the narrator must find himself fighting to accommodate, rather than something he settles into.

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.