The Similarities in Chapter 1 and 11

While reading Chapter 11 of Invisible Man, everything that was happening to the narrator felt very familiar. This chapter shares eerily similar ideas and events with Chapter 1. One of the first similarities that struck me was both chapters put the narrator in situations that affect significant aspects of his future. Whether it was getting a scholarship to college to continue his academic life or getting operated on to keep him alive, to the narrator, he needed to be in those settings. However, while these situations are so important to the narrator, he pretty much has no control whatsoever of what is happening to and around him. In Chapter 1, when he is at the gathering of the town’s most accomplished white citizens to deliver his graduation speech, he is forced to take part in a blindfolded “battle royal” against other black boys his age and then tricked into being electrocuted. In Chapter 11, he has even less control. He wakes up, not remembering anything and barely being able to move, only to be then operated on by unknown doctors (they use electrical shock treatment on him). Something else these two chapters share is that literally, they make no sense. Why did they have the narrator and the other boys partake in a battle royal, confuse them as to whether or not they should look at a naked white woman waving an American flag and trick them into shocking themselves in a gathering that’s purpose was for the narrator to recite his speech? The entire setting of Chapter 11, in itself, doesn’t really make any sense. What kind of factory has an entire hospital attached to it? Both of these chapters feel like a dream/nightmare, when you accept whatever is going on, no matter how ridiculous it seems when you think about it after waking up.

            There are many more little details each chapter had in common, but there was one major difference that I found notable. After the anger and disappointment he felt after learning what Bledsoe wrote in the letters and the feeling of freedom he gained after eating the sweet yams, the narrator has a very different mindset compared to the first chapter. During that scene in Chapter 1, he seemed to just be passively observing everything happening to him, never questioning, like a dream. With his new mindset, Chapter 11 shows him questioning what the doctors were doing, expressing how he felt at certain points and even making jokes in his head. The fact that Ellison put the narrator in a situation parallel to the very first chapter, but with a different way of thinking, shows significant growth as a character. Also, on a slightly unrelated note, during the class discussion on Chapter 11, we found it to be a kind of rebirth of the narrator, which I found interesting that it happened in a chapter so similar to Chapter 1. 

Blindness

Richard Wright’s protest novel, Native Son, might seem pretty simple from a plot standpoint. The story follows Bigger Thomas, a young, black male living under terrible (yet normal) conditions in the Southside of Chicago during a pre-Civil Rights movement era, who accidentally kills a white woman and has to deal with the consequences. However, as you delve deeper into the novel, Wright’s commentary on various issues regarding social justice in America become apparent. Themes of environment affecting actions and critiquing white liberalism are just a few of many that Wright incorporates in Native Son. One of the most intriguing ideas Wright explores is his use and interpretation of blindness throughout the story. Blindness, used both literally and figuratively, is shown through different characters and their actions.  

The first time Wright introduces blindness is with the character, Mrs. Dalton, who is literally blind. Before Bigger actually is confirmed that Mrs. Dalton is blind, he makes the assumption based on her eyes and “ghostly” appearance. After his interaction with the Dalton’s, he returns home and comes up with a realization about his own family. They are influenced by some “force, inarticulate and unconscious, making for living without thinking (...), making for a hope that blinded”. He realizes that they are unable to see that no matter what their situation is, they are not in control of what happens to them. This blindness to the limitations white society imposes on black people frustrates Bigger. They have all of these expectations of him, but they don’t understand the extreme limitations he has as a black male.