English Rowan TH

    In Chapter 23 of Invisible Man, the main character and narrator puts on a hat and a pair of sunglasses to disguise himself from Ras the Exhorter's men, who are trying to find him and beat him up. Throughout the chapter, he is mistaken for a man called Rinehart, who is apparently extremely well known all over Harlem for his roles as "Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend" (498). He puts on many different roles, but always wears the same costume, and so our narrator is mistaken for all of these different versions of the same man while wearing this disguise. During this time our narrator has the realization that he is an invisible man, and that if Rinehart can just walk around being all of these different people, he can pull off something similar. One of the threads that sort of ran through this chapter though but was never really openly discussed was the way that our narrator's ability to see other peop...

    Invisible Man 's narrator goes through a lot of different associations and iterations in his search for identity and attempts to be finally seen. The most recent, and potentially longest-running so far, is his involvement with the Brotherhood, a vaguely communist activist organization he runs into in Harlem. His involvement with this group catapults him into a level of fame around Harlem that he really enjoys. He says, "My name spread like smoke in an airless room" and "On the way to work one late spring morning I counted fifty greetings from people I didn't know." (380) He suddenly is being recognized and praised for his work and he enjoys it. But still, even though he has this level of acclaim he feels that "there were two of [him]: the old self that slept a few hours a night and dreamed sometimes of my grandfather and Bledsoe and Brockway and Mary, the self that flew without wings and plunged from great heights; and the new public self that spoke...