Invisible Man and Metaphor
In Invisible Man Ralph Ellison is not trying to tell the story of just one man. However, taking on the project of representing everyone's experience with racism is a huge and probably impossible task. Because of how hard this would be, one of the tactics that Ellison heavily relies on throughout Invisible Man is metaphor. These metaphors range from extremely on-the-nose to much more subtle, and they create a sort of almost ethereal, absurdist tone to the book as a whole. The things that the narrator goes through in this book are very extreme and often illogical or confusing. I would guess that all of this absurdity will shape the character into the manic person that he is in the prologue with his room with lightbulbs wired to every surface. I would argue that the choice to have the narrator set the tone this way at all is a strong commitment to absurdism from the get-go.
But more than just setting the tone, these metaphors also act as commentary on larger racial dynamics. This book blurs the line between things that are explicitly expressed as part of the story and metaphorical representations of these same dynamics. For example, when the narrator works at Liberty Paints, there are many nods to white supremacy in government and business. From the first page of that chapter when the electric sign, "announce[s] its message through the drifting strands of fog" as the narrator comes in for his first day of work. The message being, of course, "KEEP AMERICA PURE WITH LIBERTY PAINTS" (196). Ellison's evocation of liberty, purity, and whiteness here, as well as the connection that Liberty Paints has with the government, all work to tie it to white supremacist ideas that run as an undercurrent through American culture. To extend this idea even further, there is Lucius Brockway, who works at the heart of the factory and processes literally all of the paint. Lucius makes the base for all of the paint that is produced and claims openly that not a single drop of paint could be made without his work (215). He even tells a story about a time that he took some time off because he was sick and they were unable to make usable paint at all while he was gone (215).
The distinction between the slightly more subtle metaphor of the paint and the overt position of Lucius Brockway as the single most important person working at Liberty Paints is one of the best examples of this that I can think of. These both seem like extensions of the same argument about the way that African-American labor is perceived in a white-dominated space like the factory, but where one is explicit, the other is merely implied. Throughout the book, Ellison weaves these metaphors and real examples of different kinds of racism in a way that shows the layers of how it affects his characters.
It is interesting to read this Invisible Man right after Native Son because they both set out to discuss systemic racism but they do so in very different ways. Native Son discusses systemic racism very directly and tries to represent experiences of racism in a pretty realistic and rather gritty way, but Invisible Man, as you say, addresses racism in a very surreal way. I think one of the paradoxes of Native Son as a protest novel is that it tries to be realistic while also setting up a situation in which all the points the author wants to make in the novel are addressed. It tries to tread a line between depicting common experiences and depicting experiences extraordinary enough to make a statement with. But Invisible Man does away with this issue entirely by exemplifying racism with metaphors.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't really thought about how Ellison would combine subtle metaphors with character storylines that exhibited the situation the metaphor was addressing, but I think it's a great point about how he manages to craft something that's both believable, impactful, and able to be related to a broader context. I think the use of an explicit aspect to the arguments he makes also allows the metaphor to be brought to the forefront - even without Brockway, the metaphor about Liberty Paints would've been hard to miss, but Brockway's story and character really throw it into sharp perspective. Invisible Man is chock-full of metaphors, but still needs these characters that feature for a chapter or two - like Mr. Norton and Bledsoe (although he gets a bit more than a feature) - to keep the novel grounded in reality.
ReplyDeleteI love reading your blog posts! They're always really interesting and you're able to discuss such complex and interesting topics so well. I am really enjoying reading Invisible Man for this reason. I love how Ralph Ellison can capture so much in his stories and in this novel as a whole. Thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteI hadn't thought about connecting the books surreal feeling with all the metaphors Ellison uses but I think that's a really good point. So far as I've been reading it I'm in a state of slight confusion / not able to predict what's going to happen next because Ellison throws all these seemingly random and disconnected scenes at us while weaving metaphors in throughout. I really like what Ryan said about the differences between Native Son and Invisible Man - although they're trying to communicate similar ideas they're doing so very differently and going straight from one to the other was very shocking.
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