The narrator of The Invisible Man is clearly "invisible", seeing as he states so himself at the very start of the book by saying, "I am an invisible man". And he clearly doesn't mean it in the sense he is unable to be seen because he clarifies by saying, "No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms". So the question is why is he invisible? As he puts it, "they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me." What this means is that when people look at him they see a generalization of someone who is African-American, instead of an actual individual person. So what he means by being invisible is actually just hiding behind the fact that people see him as a generalization and therefore don't identify him in their minds as a person. This is shown when the narrator is taking to Norton and Norton refers to the narrator as a cog, showing him he thinks of him as no different from the rest of the students.
Bigger is invisible in the same way. With the exception of Max and Jan, most white people in the book fail to see him as his own person. For example. Dalton sees Bigger as just another African-American he's helped just like how Norton views the narrator. Another example is how during the search for Bigger the mob rounds up lots of other people like him even though they have a picture of him. This is similar to when the narrator beats the man up and the man claims he was mugged just because it fit convention. Another thing to consider about Bigger is that he is written to be invisible. An important part of Native Son was how Bigger was defined by environment more than he was by his actions. So in a way Bigger is meant to be invisible to the reader so that we can look past his character and more at the environment which Wright is trying to criticize.
Interesting... I can definitely see how Bigger could also be invisible due to the definition that the narrator of Invisible Man gives. The invisibility is definitely one that obscures the individuality of a person, and would make people wonder if anything they did even left an impact because they were so generalized. Good post!
ReplyDeleteThis is a really good post! I found your last point interesting - that maybe Bigger's invisibility draws the focus to the environment. I definitely see, but I wonder if it also might be that his invisibility works to highlight the injustices of his environment - clearly Bigger is not actually invisible, society just treats him as if he is. I also really liked your point about the mob rounds up random black men in order to find someone to blame, demonstrating the fact that for them, black people are pretty much interchangeable.
ReplyDeleteI like this comparison a lot, and I see where you're coming from when you suggest that Max and Jan are exceptions, as Bigger does become "visible" to Max (reflected in his ability to represent Bigger's experience in words, "accurately," as we can compare his account directly to Wright's in Book 1). Jan is an interesting case, though: I'd argue that Bigger is quite *invisible* to Jan early on, just as he is to Mary, when he's just an example of a type or category, a representative of a group they'd really like to recruit for the Communist Party, and maybe their key to some "authentic" South Side nightlife. But Jan's character--his perception of Bigger as an individual who defies his stereotypes in many ways--evolves over the course of the novel, and we might be able to say that Bigger becomes "visible" to him, too, in the end.
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