The Brotherhood is an obstacle to visibility

    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 for the Brotherhood and was becoming so much more important than the other that I seemed to run a foot race against myself." (380) The level of exposure he has is unsustainable, and it is pulling him in multiple directions at once so that he must choose between the "real" him and the public face, an extension of the way he had to take on a new name and identity when he joined the Brotherhood. 

    In addition to the Brotherhood's demand that he take on a completely new identity, they also place a very high value on collectivism. However, when the Brother talks about the collective it is more that it exists to erase the humanity of the people that make it up than to enhance their collective experiences of the world. One particularly alarming quote from Brother Wrestrum is, "Things that don't make for Brotherhood have to be rooted out." This phrasing was deeply, deeply troubling to me. The Brotherhood's idea of community and the value of the collective stems from an attempt to make everyone the same in order to force them to be "brothers" rather than making everyone brothers as they are. This can be seen from the narrator's very first interaction with a Brotherhood member. In his conversation with Brother Jack in the cafe. Jack's comment, "Why do you fellows always talk in terms of race!" (292) really exemplifies this attitude of same-ness. The Brotherhood does not embrace that diversity of human existence as reflected in its membership, instead, it seeks to "root out" those differences in order to avoid confronting the ways that people are individual. 

    These two tenets of "Brotherhood" are directly against what the narrator has repeatedly said that he is looking for, namely identity. He cannot develop or discover an identity for himself when he is being consistently told that he has to present a public face to everyone in his life that is determined for him by a group, or when he is told that he must constantly put the ideal of a collective of identical brothers, all with the same packaged opinions and talking points determined from their pamphlets rather than any type of discussion or debate, ahead of his priorities and beliefs. Especially when those beliefs are packaged and sold by people who consistently tell him it's wrong to talk about things like race that matter to his experience of the world and are a huge part of what he seeks to fight for. 

    There is a lot to be said about the various ways that different people have rendered the narrator invisible, but the Brotherhood is possibly the most potent example yet. The structure of their group demands that the narrator present a face to everyone that is different than his own, and cut off everyone who might have knowledge of the real him. He literally has to lie about who he is. At the end of the day, all that he has is the applause after his speeches but does he really even have that if the speeches are made under a name and representing priorities that are not really his?