Who is he??
But is he?
None of us are really “ourselves”—we’re just molds of our
experience. In his earlier life, the narrator
thought the things society wanted him to think, the things he thought were the
right things to think in order to be “successful,” and with effort, he
suppressed that nagging memory of his grandpa’s words. We know that after
several things happen, he rebels against the straight path and embraces that
repressed state of mind. I guess that means he became more true to himself…but
is it himself? What if he had never heard his Grandpa’s words, would the rebel
in him still have broken out? Or what if he had never gotten in that car with
Norton, and he became Bledsoe’s assistant. Would he not have been happy and
would that role not have become who he was?
We are born with our own unique skills and traits that make
us who we are, but those can only take us so far. Most of it comes down to the
opportunities and hardships and influences that come our way. After all, serial
killers were not born psychopaths. Bledsoe was not born a jerk with high blood
pressure. They were shaped to become who they are, and in a million ways, they
might have turned out different. So who can ever know who the narrator is anyways?
Is there something in his nature, like being really good at public speaking,
that made him predestined to become a highly influential and unusual person? No—he
became who he is because the circumstances of his life aligned for that. There’s
no telling who he might be if some little change made him think one thought and
not another. With that logic it hardly matters what we turn out to be, because
it’s not really us who got us there—it’s what happened to us. We will never be
able to truly see who the narrator
is. We will never be able to see who we are, who anyone is. After all, you can’t
be alive without being affected by your environment—it’s not like we were
locked in a plain white room from the moment of birth (even then we would be
affected by that, in that we would become horribly disabled). “Who we are” is
not “who we are,” it is only what we have been made to be. It doesn't matter if we ever know his name or not. We will never know
who the narrator actually is at his core—it’s impossible—and we will never know
who we ourselves by nature are, nor anyone else. I guess we are doomed to always be
invisible men.
I love the ideas that you bring up. It sorta relates to the argument of nurture vs nature. I think what makes the narrator’s situation even more complicated is the fact that he went through that experiment with the doctors. I’m pretty sure that had a huge effect on who he is. after he goes through that the narrator from the prologue starts to come through, like with his jokes. If that hadn’t happened, he might not have gone down the route where he ends up trying to fill his hole with lights. Maybe we’ll never know who we are at our cores, but maybe who we are because of our environments that is more important.
ReplyDeleteYour blog post made me think back to Native Son where one of the main arguments seemed to be that Bigger was just a product of his environment. Bigger wasn't instantly going to be a killer when he was born. The way people interacted with him and how society viewed him shaped him into one of Wright's "Biggers." Still, at the end, all the characteristics that developed Bigger into a killer is also what defines him as Bigger. The same will probably be true with the narrator. His characteristics are being developed throughout this book. Using these characteristics, we know that this person is the narrator, but also at what stage of the narrator's life. As you said, we are molds of our experience, so our characteristics will change over time, as clearly evident in the narrator.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really good point! The whole book is pretty much showing the environment that produced this "invisible man" living in a hole in the ground, who "mugs" a man who insults him before running off laughing. What led him to beat this white man bloody on the street? He evidently wasn't just born wanting to inflict violence or to even recognize the concept of invisibility
DeleteThis post made me think of another post which introduced the idea of the lobotomy as a major turning point. I think that was an event that changed him so much because it reset some of his experiences and forced him to re-learn how he sees the world and acts. I think this whole book definitely makes the narrator into a character shaped by his experiences.
ReplyDeleteI think you are absolutely right that no matter what happened, the narrator would always be himself. I believe that the narrator’s journey was in fact not to find himself, but to figure out what other people think of him. When the veil is lifted from his eyes, it’s not like he suddenly experiences a feeling of knowing who he is, quite the opposite in fact since he forgets everything. What happens is that he finally sees what other people think of him, as well as how they treat him and how their thoughts are influencing his actions. When we see him in the prologue, he is still himself but is now aware of his surroundings. The biggest example of this is when he starts beating the random man up, then stops and thinks about it from the man’s perspective. At the beginning of the book he is always worrying about what others think of him and doing the best to live up to their expectations. So, in a way his entire character arc is learning what the world thinks of him and starting to do things because he wants to, not because other people want him to.
ReplyDeleteI think that your take is a very interesting one. We as the readers take for granted that the narrator in the prologue is his "true self"; mostly because thats the way that the narrator talks about himself. The idea of one's true self really can be looked at through a lense of nature and nurture, in my opinion. To take your point for instance, about how serial killers aren't born psychopaths, is only partly true. In fact, with that example specifically, serial killers tend to be sociopathic or psychopathic (for simplicities sake I am using them interchangably even though they are not similar) because this means that their "skill" or trait as you mentioned, is their lack of empathy. This lack of empathy ENABLES them to do horrific things such as kill human beings. Thinking of this in the context of Invisible Man, there are some traits in the main character that we can see as early as the beginning that you could say ENABLED him and ALLOWED him to become who he was, regardless of the context. In my opinion, he definitely changed a lot, but, his intelligence, his public speaking skills, they both contributed to the way his life turned out. Whether that be for the better or worse. For instance, at the beginning of the novel, I would argue that the narrator was still intelligent and thoughtful but that these traits about him were being manipulated and used against him to further white supremacy. They ENABLED him to become who he became, which changed depending on the circumstances. If that makes any sense.
ReplyDelete