The Mask

Today in class we talked about a poem called "We wear the Mask." It talked about how people wear a mask sometimes and society doesn't see who they are or what they really feel on the inside. During the discussion a lot of comparison's were made to the "mask" that Bledsoe wears in Invisible Man when he is talking to Mr. Norton or the trustees and how that differs from his actual personality that comes out when he talks to the narrator.

As we were discussing I thought about the narrator and what "mask" he wears and I found that a when he enters the Brotherhood, it seems to me like he is asked to wear a "mask." He is given a new identity and is completely retaught in a new way of thinking by an older member of the Brotherhood. When he makes his speeches he isn't talking as himself but as that the identity that they have created for him, he speaks wearing the "mask" of the Brotherhood. In the beginning it seems that he is simply spouting their ideologies and doesn't completely believe in or even fully understand what he is saying.

As he begins to spend more time in his role with the Brotherhood, I think that he begins to become the "mask" that he wears. He starts to agree more with the ideas that he was taught by the Brothers and the identity that they gave him is more and more becoming his identity. I think that at the same time that he is becoming more independent and confident, he is also losing a part of he was before he came to the North.

Dreams and Surrealism

There are many parts in Invisible Man that are very "dreamlike" and surreal. In the first few chapters it was only small parts of the story, such the dreams that he had, or situations like the events that happened in the Golden Day. But as the book goes on the situations he is put in and the things that occur have become more and more surreal, like something out of a crazy dream.

I think that there are a lot of really good examples of this in the events leading up to and during his time working at the paint factory. It starts out as him crossing a bridge blanketed in fog, walking into the unknown. This scene on its own is pretty surreal, the fact that he is crossing a bridge into a place that he can't see, with fog all around him. But it only gets more surreal when he arrives at the paint factory, where he bounces from job to job being yelled at by all kinds of different people. First by Mr. Kimbro for messing up the paint and then he is sent to work in the basement with Mr. Brockway who is a bit odd and seems more like someone that would be encountered in a dream rather than real life. He is old and uneducated yet is somehow the only person who is able to keep the boilers and other parts running. 

Then he goes to get his lunch but is caught in a union meeting where he is called a "fink" and yelled at more until they decide to take a vote and then vote him out of the room. This part is very surreal how they go from calling him anti-union to suddenly having a vote about whether or not to let him into the union. After this he goes back to the basement were Mr. Brockway yells at him for being a part of the union, which he isn't, this yelling climaxes in a fight between him and the old man who ends up biting him and losing his dentures. This part, while comical, is totally unreal and would probably never happen in real life. This scene ends with the boiler exploding and the narrator passing out.

After the narrator passes out the book becomes even more dreamlike. He is waking up, as if from a crazy dream, only to find it's all real and he is in the factory hospital. In the hospital, instead of operating on him to fix the injuries he sustained in the explosion they decide to try an experimental electroshock treatment that renders him unable to move while they treat him. This part of the book is when a reader would have a hard time trying to tell if any of what was happening is real. The narrator has just woken up from an already surreal fight and explosion only to find that the doctors have decided against conventional methods and moved on to experimental electroshock treatment.

This part of the novel is so surreal that it would be very easy to convince the readers that he is actually at home dreaming all of this and that none of it is real. I think that this is done to help usher in a transition in the attitudes of the narrator. Gone is the submissive accepting narrator from the first chapters and in his place we have a narrator that is starting to change his view on everything and beginning to notice his invisibility.