One of the most hard to read moments in the novel comes at the culmination of Cholly Breedlove’s story, which ends with Cholly raping his daughter, Pecola. This scene can feel like a slap of harsh reality to the face of the reader, because up until that point we are reading Cholly’s backstory, sympathizing with him, waiting for him to overcome the hardships of his environment, yet that ending shows he never truly overcomes any emotional hardship he faced. The ending shows that Cholly was completely destroyed by the hardships of his childhood. Instead of using them to develop into a better person, he is a victim of his own environment that turns into an abuser, a predator, which is unfortunately a reality of abuse and predatory behavior to this day.

Cholly’s story begins with the information that his mother left him out to die, and he was basically saved by his aunt. When he asks about his dad, his aunt gives him very little information, and his aunt dies when he is thirteen, leaving him virtually alone in the world with no real parental guidance. After the traumatizing interaction he has with the white boys that caught him having sex with Darlene and made fun of him, encouraging him to continue as they shined their flashlights at them, he runs away to find his father.  He travels a long way to find his father, just because he goes through this experience and has no one to turn to about it, he’s dwelling on his emotions and in that moment he needed a parent, he needed someone that he could turn to and talk about what happened to him. His father, though, throws money at him, and essentially makes it clear that he wants nothing to do with him. This cements the fact that Cholly had no real parental figure when he needed them the most, and it’s something that Morrison capitalizes on right before he rapes Pecola. She writes “had he not been alone since he was thirteen” then “he might have felt a stable connection between himself and the children” (pg 160-161). This suggests he’s unable to be a healthy parental figure to his children, he has no idea how to view his children as his children, because of the absence of parental figures in his childhood.

While Cholly’s relationship to his children is a product of his own relationship with his parents, I think it’s also important to note that Cholly’s relationship to women is also explored and his distorted view that is explored in his backstory aids to his ultimate predatory view of his daughter. After the altercation with the white men, Cholly is embarrassed and places all the hate he has towards Darlene and not the white men. He blames Darlene because she is “the one who bore witness to his failure”, “the one who had created the situation”, and “the one he had not been able to protect” (pg. 151). Cholly is embarrassed for Darlene seeing how powerless he is against the white men and also for not being able to protect himself or Darlene from them. The idea that he would feel obligated to protect Darlene, places himself above her, because she is a woman, but the white men’s appearance is a reminder to him that just as the woman is below him, he is below them. He doesn’t want to fight his oppressor, and instead would rather blame the person beneath him, the person he can have power over, the person he can oppress. So Cholly’s view of women can be defined by his unresolved emotions of this encounter and his anger that is incorrectly places at Darlene, his anger that will continue to dwell in him and fuel a hatred towards women. He uses women as a scapegoat for his own oppression and ultimately, in turns, becomes their oppressor.

There are many moments of Invisible Man that feel so relevant to the present day that can really cause a reader to stop in their tracks. The first of one of these moments for me was when the Invisible Man makes his truly moving and profound speech during the old couple’s eviction. In a way, much of what was represented in the scene and said in this speech foreshadowed what is later talked about at the end of Chapter 20, the disillusioned place in history that the Invisible Man senses African Americans are succumbing to. 

The way Ellison symbolizes black history in the scene is through the various stuff that belongs to the old couple that is thrown on the sidewalk by the white eviction officers. The Invisible Man when he first sees the pile of stuff refers to it as “like a lot of junk waiting to be hauled away” as these various, seemingly insignificant items are just cluttering the sidewalk (278). When he more closely examines these things he can clearly get a sense of the timeline of the lives of the elderly couple. Some of these items the couple owned were “knocking bones” an instrument used in minstrel shows and a commemorative plate of St. Louis World’s Fair which was one of the largest human zoos in history, all these items going back to a declaration of their freedom by a slave owner (282-283). This all makes it clear that the timeline of the couple is not just a timeline of them, but a timeline of black history. The couple’s possessions are really what move the Invisible Man to make his speech, they are really the catalyst for it, and the speech brings up this idea of the Black community being “dispossessed” which is revisited multiple times later in the novel. 

I view this idea of dispossession as closely relating to the idea of falling out of the white controlled narrative in history. The Invisible Man asserts that the black community is being dispossessed by the white people in power and therefore that is what is actively oppressing them and keeping them on the outskirts of history. The fact that the objects that are the catalyst for his speech are representations of black history can further cement this idea. In addition to this, there are so many symbolic representations of this scene that can be made to directly point at the idea of black history being suppressed and ignored. 

The officer who is throwing these items on the street, these symbols of history, is white, symbolizing both the authority held by white people and their active suppression of blacks. The Invisible Man first sees the items as just junk on the street because they are thrown to be perceived in that way by the white officer. This instance shows how white people set the societal boundary to what is perceived normal, to what may be overlooked, to who gets to stay written in history. The speech that the Invisible Man makes feels like a plea for his community to realize this dispossession and to actively take back their place in history. 

Even though in the book, he is going off the cuff and hasn’t fully formed these ideas during the eviction speech, by the end of Chapter 20, many of what he is saying is aligning with this idea. This suggests that this scene with the objects, the very actions of these symbols of black history being tossed on the ground, is an act of foreshadowing to the Invisible Man’s later revelation on the importance of exclusionary narratives in history.

In W.E.B Du Bois, “The Souls of Black Folk”, he makes a strong point for highlighting the division among Black and White Americans that’s continued post-slavery. What’s interesting about Du Bois’ perspective, especially in comparison to Hurston’s, is how he experiences being black. He does talk about his individual experience but many times it feels as though he shifts to a perspective of one that is more collective. He experiences being black as being essentially it’s own entity, a part of him that defines him in society.

 In both of the texts there is no question of the divide that is present among the two races, the question is only in how that divide affects them as an individual and as a member of that race in society. What Du Bois does rather effectively, is talk about both while it feels like the other text focuses more on the former. While it is important to note that every person is going to have different individual experiences, such as Hurston’s assertion that she can both feel and not feel her blackness in a more individual perspective, there are many times where Du Bois is clearly looking more at the outside perspective. He’s looking at his experiences as black man from lenses of his own race as well as the other to form a bigger picture of a divide that he sees within society. This reads much more powerful, as it feels like he is not just speaking for himself in his text.

“To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in the land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.” Not only is this line the indication of the fact that he is speaking farther than just his individual self, he’s making a serious point in analyzing the position black people are faced with in society. By pointing out that while it may be one thing to be poor, it is another thing to be both poor and black, he’s highlighting racial differences and illustrating a concept that is still very relevant in conversation today: white privilege. He affirms that as a race, black folks are encountering hardship within itself and are in the midst of a battle to get on an equal level to their white peers. He capitalizes on that throughout the text, particularly a lot towards the end. He clearly outlines the history of how they have got here and how this divide is present as well as remaining hopeful that as a collective black folks will be able to integrate into American society, not by trying to be just like their white peers but by offering something to add to it, enriching it. 

Throughout reading Du Bois text, it felt as if a lot of what he was saying was relevant to today, not only showing how much the divide is still present, but just how much his focus on society rather than the individual came through. That’s what his text does so well, it analyzes the racial divide between society that has continued to this day and that’s why it is able to be so relevant to the current climate many years after it was written. It sheds light on all that is a racially divided America and begs the reader to recognize this and strive for something better.