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.
>
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,