Chapter 19


            Chapter 19 of Invisible Man was a wild ride of humor, discomfort, and silliness. The funniest moment of this chapter for me was when the narrator asks, “But we’re going to discuss brotherhood and ideology, aren’t we? (Ellison 411)” At this point, I couldn’t help but be reminded of a whole category of memes; they feature an image of a displeased person with captions like, “when she invites you over for beyblades but then she starts taking off her clothes.” The narrator’s cluelessness is best shown by this line. Unfortunately, the woman moves on to talk about the narrator and his speaking. She uses words like “primitive,” “forceful,” and says he has, “tom-toms beating in his voice” (Ellison 413). In using these descriptors for the narrator, she shows that despite claiming to be part of a post-racial/anti-racism movement, she may be holding onto some strange ideas about the black people: that they are inherently more “primitive,” or “forceful.” It would have been hard to read her dialogue and not feel uncomfortable.
I thought the strangest part of this chapter, however, was when her husband returns. He pokes his head into her darkened room, and by all accounts he should have seen the narrator lying in bed with his wife, but he apparently does not. The narrator seemed literally invisible to the man. Maybe this is the closest he has come to literal invisibility. The narrator wonders also, “could I have seen him without him seeing me?” The narrator’s guesses, that the husband was silent out of “sophistication,” that it had been a test, or that it had been his imagination, are as good as mine. The author probably intended something by implying the narrator’s literal invisibility to the man whose wife he slept with, I am just not sure what.
Anyone have any ideas?

Comments

  1. Anthony COctober 19, 2019 at 10:11 PM

    We talked a bit in class about how this scene is similar to when Bigger accidentally kills Mary in Native Son. Both Ellison and Wright did great jobs of showing how the narrator and Bigger respectively were feeling. Their minds were flurries of thought, and entire paragraphs were dedicated to their thoughts on their situations. For others, many of the things that the narrator and Bigger think about and fret over would seem trivial. Both of them, however, are unsure of how to respond to the situation because their entire lives they've never had to deal with anything like it. The narrator from Invisible Man in particular has always aimed to remain passive and quiet, so the woman making all of these blatant moves on him is completely unprecedented. I can only imagine how awkward and frightening being in a situation like that would be.

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  2. MitchellOctober 22, 2019 at 10:41 AM

    It's entirely possible that the husband *does* see the narrator in his wife's bed; he just doesn't react. They both seem to be flaunting their sophisticated and progressive open relationship, making a point out of how casual they're being about this arrangement. Of course, the narrator has never heard of anything like this, and he *experiences* it as an early moment of invisibility, as you say (and he's also increasingly convinced that the Brotherhood is setting him up). But the text seems to make clear that the husband knows what his wife has been up to, and he approves.

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  3. Adit's BolgOctober 22, 2019 at 3:09 PM

    The Narrator's blindness is put on full effect here. It's kinda like a childish metaphor of his ignorance throughout this whole novel. We also get to see this idea of mutual invisibility. She only sees his blackness which turns her on and he only sees the Brotherhood. Nobody can see anybody.

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