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The Narrator Essay Research Paper The narrator (стр. 2 из 2)

Reverend Barbee, a black man wearing dark glasses, speaks at the

chapel service. He tells the story of the Founder, a former slave born into

poverty, but with a precocious intelligence. The Founder was almost killed as

a child when a cousin splashed him with lye, ’shriveling his seed.’ After nine

days in a coma, he awoke as though he had ‘risen from the dead or had been

reborn.’ He taught himself how to read and later became a runaway slave. He

went North and pursued further education. After many years, he returned to

the South and founded the college to which he devoted the rest of his life’s

work. The sermon deeply moves the narrator. Barbee stumbles on the way

back to his chair, his glasses fall from his face, and the narrator catches a

glimpse of his sightless eyes–Barbee is blind.

The narrator meets with Bledsoe after the service. When he learns that

the narrator took Norton to the old slave quarters, the Golden Day and the

Trueblood cabin, Bledsoe becomes very angry. The narrator explains that

Norton ordered him to stop at the cabin. Bledsoe says that white people are

always giving orders, and that the narrator, having grown up in the South as a

black man, should know how to lie his way out of such orders. Bledsoe plans

to investigate both the veteran who mocked Norton and the college; he also

plans to expel the narrator. The narrator threatens to tell everyone that

Bledsoe lied to Norton about not punishing him. Bledsoe is shocked. He has

worked hard to achieve his position of power and doesn’t plan to lose it.

However, he tells the boy to go to New York for the summer and work to

earn his year’s tuition. He offers to send letters of recommendation to some of

the trustees to ensure that he gets work. If he does well, Bledsoe hints that he

will be able to return to school. The next day, the narrator retrieves seven

sealed letters and promises Bledsoe that he holds no resentment for his

punishment. Bledsoe praises his attitude, but the narrator remains haunted by

his grandfather’s prophetic dying words.

Analysis

Bledsoe is a master of masks. Imperious and commanding with the

narrator, he becomes conciliatory and servile with Norton. Bledsoe’s

infuriated response to the narrator’s explanation that he drove Norton to the

old slaves quarters simply because Norton had asked him to aggravates him

further: “Damn what he wants. We take these white folks where we want

them to go, we show them what we want them to see. Don’t you know that?”

The narrator is shocked to learn that the surface appearance of humble

servility is a mask under which Bledsoe manipulates and deceives powerful

white donors to his advantage. He is also shocked that Bledsoe thought he

knew this all along. However, the narrator has had blind faith in the ‘truth’ of

the surface appearance until now.

Moreover, Bledsoe has attempted to preserve the rich donors’

blindness to some aspects of the black experience in the South. He becomes

angry when he learns that the narrator has unwittingly removed the blindfold

from at least one of them. The narrator has disrupted the masquerade of the

‘model black citizen,’ and Bledsoe anxiously seeks to repair the damage. The

narrator’s own blindfold has been removed, and the knowledge he has gained

overwhelms him. He is branded a traitor to the college’s image, and he again

remembers his grandfather’s words: believing in the mask of meekness is

treachery. Bledsoe, echoing Booker T. Washington’s philosophy, practices

humility and preaches the virtue of humble contentment with one’s ‘place’ to

the students; but he has been living the grandfather’s advice and uses it as a

mask to his own advantage.

However, we find that Bledsoe uses his humility mask to dupe the

students as well the white donors. He uses the college and Washington’s

ideology for the preservation of his own position of power rather than for the

broad social progress for his people. While toying with an old leg shackle

from slavery, he explains the narrator’s expulsion by claiming that he has

become ‘dangerous to the college.’ Bledsoe calls the shackle a ’symbol of

progress.’ The narrator’s threat to expose Bledsoe’s double-dealing to Norton

and the rest of the college quickly changes Bledsoe’s manner. Bledsoe tells

the narrator that he has ‘played the nigger’ long and hard to get to his position

and he doesn’t plan to let one young, naive student vanquish his

accomplishments. Thus, we find evidence that that his concern for the

college’s image is really just a mask, a cover up of his selfish concern for his

image.

Bledsoe’s power depends on preventing the narrator from ripping his

mask off and exposing his duplicity. He tells the boy to go to New York for

the summer, and suggests that he might be allowed to return to school in the

fall. It will become clear later that the narrator has still not learned to see

beneath the surface; he trusts Bledsoe and overlooks his , propensity for

double-dealing precisely when he should most remember it. The narrator’s

grandfather advised his family to use masks as a form of self-defense and

resistance against racist white power, but Bledsoe uses it as a weapon against

members of his own race. Moreover, he uses it to achieve an influential

position within the white-dominated power structure rather than as a means to

dismantle it, ultimately revealing the limitations of the grandfather’s philosophy.

Reverend Barbee’s sermon on the Founder develops this theme further.

Every student is expected to attend this service and receive a peculiar

‘education.’ Rather than teaching the students to take advantage of invisibility

through masks like Bledsoe, the sermon reinforces blind faith and allegiance to

the college’s and Bledsoe’s outward philosophy. The sermon treats the

Founder like a god of sorts, whose ideology should be trusted completely like

a religion. The sermon implies that his ideology and his life represent a

universal example that should be followed blindly rather than skillfully

manipulated, as in Bledsoe’s case.

Even the Founder himself, the figure head of the college’s power and

glory, is castrated. In childhood, a cousin threw lye on him and ’shriveled his

seed.’ If the Founder himself is sterile, how can his vision and his legacy be

fertile? His legacy’s ‘offspring’ are a blind preacher, the double-dealing

Bledsoe, and a narcissistic Boston philanthropist who refuses to admit his own

incestuous attraction to his deceased daughter. The Founder’s ‘re-birth’

signifies a form of death: his name is lost to history; and he becomes an empty

symbol manipulated by men like Bledsoe to preserve the blindness of others.

The reverent sermon revives the narrator’s blind love and devotion to the

college and to its program; however, this devotion prompts the narrator to

blindly accept a rotten deal with Bledsoe. Bledsoe’s shackle becomes a

symbol of continuing enslavement to multiple forms of blindness.

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Invisible Man – Chapters 7-9

Summary

On the bus to New York, the narrator encounters the veteran who

mocked Norton and the college. Bledsoe has arranged to have him

transferred to a psychiatric facility in Washington D.C. The narrator doesn’t

believe Bledsoe could have anything to do with it, but the veteran winks and

tells him to learn to see under the surface of things. He tells the narrator to

hide himself from white people, from authority, from the ‘big man who’s never

there’ but is always ‘pulling his strings.’ Crenshaw, the veteran’s attendant, tells

him that he talks too much. The veteran replies that he verbalizes things that

most men only feel. Before he transfers to another bus, the veteran advises the

narrator, “Be your own father.” The narrator arrives in New York and is

astonished to see a black officer directing white drivers in the street. He sees

a gathering on a sidewalk in Harlem. A man is giving a speech about ‘chasing

them out’ in a West Indian accent. The narrator feels as though a riot could

erupt at any minute. He has seen Ras the Exhorter giving a speech. He quickly

finds a place called the Men’s House and takes a room.

Over the next few days, the narrator delivers all of his letters except

one addressed to Mr. Emerson. After a week, he receives no responses. He

tries to reach the trustees by phone only to receive polite refusals from their

secretaries. His money is beginning to run out, and he entertains vague doubts

about Bledsoe.

The narrator sets out to deliver his last letter and meets a jive-talking

man named Peter Wheatstraw who recognizes his southern roots. He tells the

narrator that Harlem is nothing but a bear’s den, reminding the narrator of the

stories of Jack the Rabbi t and Jack the Bear. He stops for breakfast at a deli.

The waiter says he looks like he’d enjoy the special: pork chops, grits, eggs,

hot biscuits, and coffee. Insulted, the narrator orders orange juice, toast, and

coffee.

The narrator arrives at Mr. Emerson’s office. He meets Mr. Emerson’s

son, a nervous little man. Emerson leaves with the letter only to return with a

vaguely disturbed expression, chattering about his ‘analyst’ and ’some things

being too unjust for words .’ Finally, Emerson allows the narrator to read the

letter: Bledsoe has told each of the addressees that the narrator was

permanently expelled and had to be sent away under false pretenses to

protect the college; he never intended for the narrator to di scover the finality

of his expulsion. Emerson says that his father is a strict, unforgiving man and

will not help him, but he offers to get the narrator a job at the Liberty Paints

plants. That narrator leaves the office full of anger and a desire for r evenge.

He imagines Bledsoe requesting that Mr. Emerson ‘hope the bearer of this

letter to death and keep him running.’ He calls the plant for a job and is told to

report to work the next morning.

Analysis

The reigning ideology in the South for the advancement of black

Americans is that of Booker T. Washington and the college. Both white and

black Southerners practice this ideology. At the Golden Day, the veteran

succinctly pointed out the blindness and en slavement that this ideology entails,

and Bledsoe ‘expels’ him from the South just as he expels the narrator. Unlike

the narrator, however, the veteran has wanted a transfer for years. His

defiance of the masquerade through ‘free speech’ earns him the ‘ freedom’ he

has wanted, but that of course becomes an ironic victory. His trip North leads

only to further confinement in another asylum in the capitol of a nation

purportedly founded on the principles of freedom.

The veteran tries to clarify the power system for the narrator. He tells

the boy to lose his blindness and see under surface appearances because

power works most efficiently when invisible, hidden behind deceptive masks.

The veteran revives the doll met aphor with the image of important men pulling

strings. Those controlling the narrator’s life remain invisible, hidden behind

masks. Pulling his strings, they treat him like an object, not a person.

However, the veteran ascribes the phrase ‘the big man who’s never there’ to

powerful whites. He fails to recognize the manner in which black men like

Bledsoe use this form of power against other black Americans. Ultimately,

Bledsoe himself may remain blind to his own role as a mask behind which

white power and influence can operate and propagate. He uses the same

deceptive means to achieve power. However, as we noted in the last section,

rather than dismantling the white-dominated power structure, he reinforces

and reproduces it.

The veteran represents an old literary trope: the fool. By exploiting the

ambiguity of his comic and tragic role, he defines his version of the truth; and

his fool’s mask allows him to speak openly with fewer consequences.

However, his ambiguous banter keeps the reader unsure of his seriousness.

For instance, when he advises the narrator to be his ‘own father’ before

leaving the bus, he is actually offering his own ‘fatherly advice.’ He is telling the

narrator to define his own identity, while simult aneously defining it for him.

The narrator is on an archetypal journey. Like thousands of black

Americans, he joins the Great Migration North looking for freedom. He

marvels at the variety and vibrancy of Harlem. He sees Ras making an

inflammatory speech in the street calling the b lack Harlem residents to drive

out the whites,