In the novel Invisible Man, the narrator is in a constant struggle to determine who he is. He strives for the acceptance and clearance of others, but in doing so he constantly changes himself as well. In terms of this novel, I wonder if the narrator tried to determine his own fate, by following others and often doing what he thought he ought to, he lost his sense of self entirely. I believe it was his fate that he had to take Mr. Norton to the Golden Day. It was his fate that he got kicked out of school and sent to New York, and it was his fate that he got rejected from job after job once he got there. But then, he started to change. When he joined the brotherhood, that changed his course in life for awhile. Almost immediately, he changed. He adopted the ideas that others had as his own. At this point, the narrator has lost a lot of who he is. He is also used again and again by others for personal gain. But he is ultimately to blame for that because he allows it to happen.
I think that his fate comes back to the words his grandfather said to him on his deathbed. He was meant to hear that. He needed to know that it was his "job" to be an spy in the enemy's territory. He needed to be told to say yes in order to undermine them. Though it takes the narrator pretty much the entire novel to understand what his grandfather meant, he had to screw up a few time in order to truly grasp the man's meaning. So maybe all of his supposed "detours" where he "loses" his own ideas and thoughts by being used are really how he finds himself. Without his misstep with Mr. Norton, he never would've ended up in New York. If he had never been censored during a speech, how would he know what his own ideas are? If he didn't spend his time trying to be seen, how could he possibly know the truth that he is in fact invisible?
The true measure of this change is in the end of the book when the narrator meets Mr. Norton again. In the beginning, he never would've dared to talk to a white man the way he did. But in the end he has the nerve to ask him if he is "ashamed" of himself. His constant struggles to be something different actually lead him to himself. So while his actions and life lead him down into the ground, he actually became enlightened as a result. Did he make the choice to do some of the things? In a way, yes. But all of these events proved to be far more important the he originally guessed. Little did he know, but, as fate would have it, even the narrator's biggest screw-ups determined his view on himself and life as a whole.
Interesting approach, Emily.
ReplyDeleteTo begin at the end (of your comments), I agree that our mistakes and missteps are every bit as important, if not more, as our successes, in helping us determine our identity. But how do we know, or decide, whether or not fate has a hand in it all? If we assume our narrator was fated to go through all the "hells" he goes through, that's pretty cruel. And is that his personal fate, or perhaps a kind of shared fate, for everyone with that skin color? If his grandfather's words haunted him all his life, that sounds like the argument that character is fate--and it works pretty well with this novel. One might just think more generally about fate as a lack of freedom to choose our own path, and blacks in a racist society certainly have less freedom than whites to do so. Imagine if he had rebelled against those voices from the start. What would happen to him? What would the "leading white citizens" at the Battle Royal do to him? And after that? Perhaps fate is for everyone who is stereotyped and pigeonholed, and freedom is for the rest of us. What do you think?