Science-fiction novels in English literature H. G wells and his "Invisible Man" Plan: Introduction 3

Chapter 2. Legacy of H.G. Wells
In spite of an awareness of possible world catastrophe that underlay much of his earlier work and flared up again in old age, Wells in his lifetime was regarded as the chief literary spokesman of the liberal optimism that preceded World War I. No other writer has caught so vividly the energy of this period, its adventurousness, its feeling of release from the conventions of Victorian thought and propriety. Wells’s influence was enormous, both on his own generation and on that which immediately followed it. None of his contemporaries did more to encourage revolt against Christian tenets and accepted codes of behaviour, especially as regards sex, in which, both in his books and in his personal life, he was a persistent advocate of an almost complete freedom. Though in many ways hasty, ill-tempered, and contradictory, Wells was undeviating and fearless in his efforts for social equality, world peace, and what he considered to be the future good of humanity.
As a creative writer his reputation rests on the early science fiction books and on the comic novels. In his science fiction, he took the ideas and fears that haunted the mind of his age and gave them symbolic expression as brilliantly conceived fantasy made credible by the quiet realism of its setting. In the comic novels, though his psychology lacks subtlety and the construction of his plots is often awkward, he shows a fund of humour and a deep sympathy for ordinary people. Wells’s prose style is always careless and lacks grace, yet he has his own gift of phrase and a true ear for vernacular speech, especially that of the lower middle class of London and southeastern England. His best work has a vigour, vitality, and exuberance unsurpassed, in its way, by that of any other British writer of the early 20th century.
The Invisible Man is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells. Originally serialised in Pearson's Weekly in 1897, it was published as a novel the same year. The Invisible Man to whom the title refers is Griffin, a scientist who has devoted himself to research into optics and who invents a way to change a body's refractive index to that of air so that it neither absorbs nor reflects light. He carries out this procedure on himself and renders himself invisible, but fails in his attempt to reverse it. A practitioner of random and irresponsible violence, Griffin has become an iconic character in horror fiction.
While its predecessors, The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau, were written using first-person narrators, Wells adopts a third-person objective point of view in The Invisible Man. The novel is considered influential, and helped establish Wells as the "father of science fiction".[1]
Plot summary
A mysterious man, Griffin, referred to as 'the stranger', arrives at the local inn owned by Mr. and Mrs. Hall of the English village of Iping, West Sussex, during a snowstorm. The stranger wears a long-sleeved, thick coat and gloves; his face is hidden entirely by bandages except for a prosthetic nose, and he wears a wide-brimmed hat. He is excessively reclusive, irascible, unfriendly, and introverted. He demands to be left alone and spends most of his time in his rooms working with a set of chemicals and laboratory apparatus, only venturing out at night. He also causes a lot of accidents, but when Mrs. Hall addresses this, the stranger angrily demands that the cost of the damage be put on his bill. While Griffin is staying at the inn, hundreds of strange glass bottles arrive. Many local townspeople believe this to be very odd. He becomes the talk of the village with many theorizing as to his origins.
Meanwhile, a mysterious burglary occurs in the village. Griffin is running out of money and is trying to find a way to pay for his board and lodging. When his landlady demands that he pay his bill and quit the premises, he reveals his invisibility to her in a fit of anger. An attempt to apprehend the stranger by police officer Jaffers is thwarted when he undresses to take advantage of his invisibility, fights off his would-be captors, and flees to the South Downs.
There Griffin coerces a tramp, Thomas Marvel, to become his assistant. With Marvel, he returns to the village to recover three notebooks that contain records of his experiments. Marvel attempts to betray the Invisible Man, who threatens to kill him. Marvel escapes to the seaside town of Port Burdock, pursued to a local inn by the Invisible Man, who is shot by one of the bar patrons.
The Invisible Man takes shelter in a nearby house that turns out to belong to Dr. Kemp, a former acquaintance from medical school. To Kemp, he reveals his true identity. Griffin is an albino former medical student who left medicine to devote himself to optics.
Griffin tells Kemp the story of how he invented chemicals capable of rendering bodies invisible, which he first tried on a cat, then himself, how he burned down the boarding house he was staying in to cover his tracks, found himself ill-equipped to survive in the open, eventually stole some clothing from a theatrical supply shop on Drury Lane, and then headed to Iping to attempt to reverse the invisibility. Having been driven somewhat unhinged by the procedure and his experiences, he now imagines that he can make Kemp his secret confederate, describing a plan to use his invisibility to terrorise the nation.
Kemp has already denounced Griffin to the local authorities, led by Port Burdock's chief of police, Colonel Adye, and is waiting for help to arrive as he listens to this wild proposal. When Adye and his men arrive at Kemp's house, Griffin fights his way out and the next day leaves a note announcing that Kemp himself will be the first man to be killed in the "Reign of Terror". Kemp, a cool-headed character, tries to organise a plan to use himself as bait to trap the Invisible Man, but a note that he sends is stolen from his servant by Griffin. During the chase the invisible Griffin arms himself with an iron bar and kills a bystander.^[2]
Griffin shoots Adye, then breaks into Kemp's house. Adye's constables fend him off and Kemp bolts for the town, where the local citizenry come to his aid. Still obsessed with killing Kemp, Griffin nearly strangles the doctor but he is cornered, seized, and savagely beaten by the enraged mob, his last words a desperate cry for mercy. Despite Griffin's murderous actions, Kemp urges the mob to stand away and tries to save the life of his assailant, though unsuccessfully. The Invisible Man's battered body gradually becomes visible as he dies, pitiable in the stillness of death. A local policeman shouts to have someone cover Griffin's face with a sheet.
In the epilogue, it is revealed that Marvel has secretly kept Griffin's notes and—with the help of the stolen money—has now become a successful business owner, running the "Invisible Man Inn". However, when not running his inn, Marvel sits in his office trying to decipher the notes in the hopes of one day recreating Griffin's work. Because several pages were accidentally washed clean during Marvel's chase of Griffin, and the remaining notes are coded in Greek and Latin, and Marvel has no comprehension of even the basic mathematical symbols he sees in the notes, he is completely incapable of understanding them.^[2]
Children's literature was a prominent genre in the 1890s. According to John Sutherland, Wells and his contemporaries such as Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling "essentially wrote boy's books for grown-ups." Sutherland identifies The Invisible Man as one such book.^[3] Wells said that his inspiration for the novella was "The Perils of Invisibility," one of the Bab Ballads by W. S. Gilbert, which includes the couplet "Old Peter vanished like a shot/but then - his suit of clothes did not."[4] Another influence on The Invisible Man was Plato's Republic, a book which had a significant effect on Wells when he read it as an adolescent. In the second book of the Republic, Glaucon recounts the legend of the Ring of Gyges, which posits that, if a man were made invisible and could act with impunity, he would "go about among men with the powers of a god."[5] Wells wrote the original version of the tale between March and June 1896. This version was a 25,000 word short story titled "The Man at the Coach and Horses" with which Wells was dissatisfied, so he extended it.
2.2 Scientific accuracy
Russian writer Yakov I. Perelman pointed out in Physics Can Be Fun (1962) that from a scientific point of view, a man made invisible by Griffin's method should have been blind because a human eye works by absorbing incoming light, not letting it through completely. Wells seems to show some awareness of this problem in Chapter 20, where the eyes of an otherwise invisible cat retain visible retinas. Nonetheless, this would be insufficient because the retina would be flooded with light (from all directions) that ordinarily is blocked by the opaque sclera of the eyeball. Also, any image would be badly blurred if the eye had an invisible cornea and lens.
Legacy
Further information: The Invisible Man in popular culture
The Invisible Man has been adapted for, and referred to in, film, television, audio drama, and comics. Allen Grove, professor of English at Alfred University states,
The Invisible Man has a wealth of progeny. The novel was adapted into comic book form by Classics Illustrated in the 1950s, and by Marvel Comics in 1976. Many writers and filmmakers also created sequels to the story, something the novel’s ambiguous ending encourages. Over a dozen movies and television series are based on the novel, including a 1933 James Whale film and a 1984 series by the BBC. The novel has been adapted for radio numerous times, including a 2017 audio version starring John Hurt as the invisible man. The cultural pervasiveness of The Invisible Man has led to everything from his cameo in an episode of Tom and Jerry to the Queen song "The Invisible Man".[7]
Herbert George Wells, also known as H. G. Wells (1866-1946) was an English novelist and journalist. Wells is known particularly for his science fiction novels, such as The War of the Worlds (1898) and The Time Machine (1895). Some of his novels have even been made into motion pictures, such as The Invisible Man (1897), The Time Machine (1895), and The War of the Worlds (1898). Wells has won recognition and acclaim for many of his novels, and in 1921, 1932, 1935 and 1946, Wells was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Let's take a look at Wells's life, contributions, and books.
H. G. Wells was born on the 21st of September 1866 in Kent (England), to parents Joseph and Sarah. His family were of a working-class background, but his educational experience was lacking. He went into employment aged 14 years old until the age of 18 years old when he received a scholarship to study Biology at the Norman School of Science. While at the Norman School of Science, Wells studied under T. H. Huxley, who inspired much of his science fiction writing. After attending London University, Wells became a science teacher, and in the meantime began his writing career.
H. G. Wells: later life
H. G. Wells considered himself to be an active socialist, and believed firmly in free thought and speech. He married his cousin Isabel Mary Wells in 1891, but the two separated soon afterwards in 1894. In 1895 he remarried former student Amy Catherine Robbins. His first book, Textbook of Biology, was published in 1893. Shortly following this in 1895, he published The Time Machine. During his lifetime, Wells had two sons with his wife Amy, and both Wells and Amy remained married until she died in 1928. Wells also had two other children: one daughter with Amber Reeves, and another son with Rebecca West. Wells enjoyed a successful writing career during his lifetime, writing at least 14 novels.
First published in 1895, Wells's novel The Time Machine explores the potential future of humans as bleak and dystopian. The novel follows the unnamed protagonist – the Time Traveller – as he travels in time to the year 802,701 A.D. When he arrives, he finds two races of people: the Eloi and the Morlocks. The Eloi people are innocent and peaceful, while the Morlocks appear to be the exact opposite, being predatory and monstrous. The conflict between the two races seems to have an uncanny resemblance to 19th-century society, in particular mirroring its capitalism and class divisions.
Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall; conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint, patience, and decision. And the institution of the family, and the emotions that arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the tenderness for offspring, parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the young. (ch.4)
Published in 1896, The Island of Doctor Moreau explores protagonist Edward Prendick's story after being shipwrecked. He is rescued by a ship that is passing by, and revived by character Montgomery, a former medical student. The ship's captain grows to dislike Prendick and he is to be thrown overboard. However, he is rescued yet again by Montgomery and this time also by scientist Moreau, who is in possession of an island. It is there that Prendick makes some shocking and brutal discoveries about Moreau, and his origins.
The Invisible Man, published in 1897, follows the story of mad scientist called Griffin. Griffin is somewhat reclusive, and does not seem to enjoy socialising with others. After experimenting, Griffins learns how to become invisible, affording him the title of the Invisible Man. Griffin is rejected by those in his community, and we learn that he is now using his power of invisibility to commit heinous crimes, including arson and murder. Towards the end of the novel, the police search for Griffin, but to no avail. However, it is those in the community who end up catching and killing him, and at the end of the novel he becomes visible once again.
Published in 1898, The War of the Worlds is one of Wells's most famous novels. The protagonist of the novel is nameless, and narrates the story in which Earth has been invaded by Martians. The Martians have run out of supplies and resources, and so, seek to conquer the Earth.
Soon enough there is war between the Martians and the human military, who find that they are ill-equipped in the face of Martian heat rays, which incinerate without effort anything and everything in their path. The protagonist then moves on to narrating the tale from his younger brother's perspective, when he experienced the invasion. The war between Martians and humans rages for a while, but at the end of the novel, the Martians ultimately die from earth's bacteria and diseases, which their bodily systems are not used to.
Wells's The First Men in the Moon, published in 1901, tells the tale of not one but two protagonists - Mr Bedford, a businessman from London, and Mr Cavor, a physicist. The two characters become friends, and travel to the moon with the help of an anti-gravity like material that Mr Cavor has produced. Although initially believing that there is no life on the moon, the two discover that in fact there is a whole landscape of creatures. After being captured by some of these creatures named the Selenites, Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor have to fight their way to freedom. However, after an accident only one manages to return to Earth, whilst the other is recaptured.
What is this spirit in man that urges him forever to depart from happiness and security, to toil, to place himself in danger, even to risk a reasonable certainty of death? It dawned upon me up there in the moon as a thing I ought always to have known, that man is not made simply to go about being safe and comfortable and well fed and amused. Against his interest, against his happiness he is constantly being driven to do unreasonable things. Some force not himself impels him and go he must. (ch.19)
The Invisible Man is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells. Originally serialized in Pearson's Weekly in 1897, it was published as a novel the same year. The Invisible Man of the title is Griffin, a scientist who has devoted himself to research into optics and invents a way to change a body's refractive index to that of air so that it neither absorbs nor reflects light and thus becomes invisible. He successfully carries out this procedure on himself, but fails in his attempt to reverse it. While its predecessors, The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau, were written using first-person narrators, Wells adopts a third-person objective point of view in The Invisible Man. A mysterious man, Griffin, arrives at the local inn of the English village of Iping, West Sussex, during a snowstorm. The stranger wears a long-sleeved, thick coat and gloves; his face is hidden entirely by bandages except for a fake pink nose; and he wears a wide-brimmed hat. He is excessively reclusive, irascible, and unfriendly. He demands to be left alone and spends most of his time in his rooms working with a set of chemicals and laboratory apparatus, only venturing out at night. While Griffin is staying at the inn, hundreds of strange glass bottles (that he calls his luggage) arrive. Many local townspeople believe this to be very strange. He becomes the talk of the village. Meanwhile, a mysterious burglary occurs in the village. Griffin is running out of money and is trying to find a way to pay for his board and lodging. When his landlady demands that he pay his bill and quit the premises, he reveals part of his invisibility to her in a fit of pique. An attempt to apprehend the stranger is frustrated when he undresses to take advantage of his invisibility, fights off his would-be captors, and flees to the downs. There Griffin coerces a tramp, Thomas Marvel, into becoming his assistant. With Marvel, he returns to the village to recover three notebooks that contain records of his experiments. When Marvel attempts to betray the Invisible Man to the police, Griffin chases him to the seaside town of Port Burdock, threatening to kill him. Marvel escapes to a local inn and is saved by the people at the inn, but Griffin escapes. Marvel later goes to the police and tells them of this "invisible man," then requests to be locked up in a high-security jail. Griffin's furious attempt to avenge his betrayal leads to his being shot. He takes shelter in a nearby house that turns out to belong to Dr. Kemp, a former acquaintance from medical school. To Kemp, he reveals his true identity: the Invisible Man is Griffin, a former medical student who left medicine to devote himself to optics. Griffin recounts how he invented chemicals capable of rendering bodies invisible, and, on impulse, performed the procedure on himself. Griffin tells Kemp of the story of how he became invisible. He explains how he tried the invisibility on a cat, then himself. Griffin burned down the boarding house he was staying in, along with all the equipment he used to turn invisible, to cover his tracks; but he soon realised that he was ill-equipped to
Invisible Man is Ralph Ellison's first novel, published by Random House in 1952. It addresses many of the social and intellectual issues faced by African Americans in the early 20th century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity.
Invisible Man won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, making Ellison the first African-American writer to win the award.[2] In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Invisible Man 19th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.[3] Time magazine included the novel in its 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005 list, calling it "the quintessential American picaresque of the 20th century", rather than a "race novel, or even a bildungsroman".[4] Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Ruland recognize a black existentialist vision with a "Kafka-like absurdity".[5] According to The New York Times, Barack Obama modeled his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father on Ellison's novel.[6]
Background
Ellison says in his introduction to the 30th Anniversary Edition that he started to write what would eventually become Invisible Man in a barn in Waitsfield, Vermont, in the summer of 1945 while on sick leave from the Merchant Marine.[7] The barn was actually in the neighboring town of Fayston.[8] The book took five years to complete with one year off for what Ellison termed an "ill-conceived short novel".[9] Invisible Man was published as a whole in 1952. Ellison had published a section of the book in 1947, the famous "Battle Royal" scene, which had been shown to Cyril Connolly, the editor of Horizon magazine by Frank Taylor, one of Ellison's early supporters.
In his speech accepting the 1953 National Book Award, Ellison said that he considered the novel's chief significance to be its "experimental attitude".[10] Before Invisible Man, many (if not most) novels dealing with African Americans were written solely for social protest, notably, Native Son and Uncle Tom's Cabin. The narrator in Invisible Man says, "I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either", signaling the break from the normal protest novel that Ellison held about his work. In the essay "The World and the Jug", which is a response to Irving Howe's essay "Black Boys and Native Sons", which "pit[s] Ellison and [James] Baldwin against [Richard] Wright and then", as Ellison would say, "gives Wright the better argument", Ellison makes a fuller statement about the position he held about his book in the larger canon of work by an American who happens to be of African ancestry. In the opening paragraph to that essay Ellison poses three questions: "Why is it so often true that when critics confront the American as Negro they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confident superiority to quite primitive modes of analysis? Why is it that Sociology-oriented critics seem to rate literature so far below politics and ideology that they would rather kill a novel than modify their presumptions concerning a given reality which it seeks in its own terms to project? Finally, why is it that so many of those who would tell us the meaning of Negro life never bother to learn how varied it really is?"
Placing Invisible Man within the canon of either the Harlem Renaissance or the Black Arts Movement is difficult. It owes allegiance to both and neither. Ellison's resistance to being pigeonholed by his peers bubbled over into his statement to Irving Howe about what he deemed to be a relative vs. an ancestor. He says to Howe "...perhaps you will understand when I say that he [Wright] did not influence me if I point out that while one can do nothing about choosing one's relatives, one can, as an artist, choose one's 'ancestors'. Wright was, in this sense, a 'relative'; Hemingway an 'ancestor'." It was this idea of "playing the field", so to speak, not being "all-in", that led to some of Ellison's more staunch critics. Howe, in "Black Boys and Native Sons", but also other black writers such as John Oliver Killens, who once denounced Invisible Man by saying: "The Negro people need Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man like we need a hole in the head or a stab in the back. ... It is a vicious distortion of Negro life."
Ralph Ellison in 1961
Ellison's "ancestors" included, among others, The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. In an interview with Richard Kostelanetz, Ellison states that what he had learned from the poem was imagery and also improvisation techniques he had only before seen in jazz.[11] Some other influences include William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Ellison once called Faulkner the South's greatest artist. In the Spring 1955 Paris Review, Ellison said of Hemingway: "I read him to learn his sentence structure and how to organize a story. I guess many young writers were doing this, but I also used his description of hunting when I went into the fields the next day. I had been hunting since I was eleven, but no one had broken down the process of wing-shooting for me, and it was from reading Hemingway that I learned to lead a bird. When he describes something in print, believe him; believe him even when he describes the process of art in terms of baseball or boxing; he’s been there."[9]
Some of Ellison's influences had a more direct impact on his novel as when Ellison divulges this, in his introduction to the 30th anniversary of Invisible Man, that the "character" ("in the dual sense of the word") who had announced himself on his page he "associated, ever so distantly, with the narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground". Although, despite the "distantly" remark, it appears that Ellison used that novella more than just on that occasion. The beginning of Invisible Man, for example, seems to be structured very similar to Notes from Underground: "I am a sick man" compared to "I am an invisible man".
Arnold Rampersad, Ellison's biographer, expounds that Melville had a profound influence on Ellison's freedom to describe race so acutely and generously. [The narrator] "resembles no one else in previous fiction so much as he resembles Ishmael of Moby-Dick". Ellison signals his debt in the prologue to the novel, where the narrator remembers a moment of truth under the influence of marijuana and evokes a church service: "Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is the 'Blackness of Blackness'. And the congregation answers: 'That blackness is most black, brother, most black...'" In this scene Ellison "reprises a moment in the second chapter of Moby-Dick", where Ishmael wanders around New Bedford looking for a place to spend the night and enters a black church: "It was a negro church; and the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there." According to Rampersad, it was Melville who "empowered Ellison to insist on a place in the American literary tradition" by his example of "representing the complexity of race and racism so acutely and generously" in Moby-Dick. Other likely influences to Ellison, by way of how much he speaks about them, are: Kenneth Burke, Andre Malraux, and Mark Twain, to name a few.[citation needed]
Political influences and the Communist Party
The letters he wrote to fellow novelist Richard Wright as he started working on the novel provide evidence for his disillusion with and defection from the Communist Party USA for perceived revisionism. In a letter to Wright on August 18, 1945, Ellison poured out his anger toward party leaders for betraying African-American and Marxist class politics during the war years: "If they want to play ball with the bourgeoisie they needn't think they can get away with it... Maybe we can't smash the atom, but we can, with a few well-chosen, well-written words, smash all that crummy filth to hell."[12] Ellison resisted attempts to ferret out such allusions in the book itself however, stating "I did not want to describe an existing Socialist or Communist or Marxist political group, primarily because it would have allowed the reader to escape confronting certain political patterns, patterns which still exist and of which our two major political parties are guilty in their relationships to Negro Americans."
Plot summary
The narrator, an unnamed black man, begins by describing his living conditions: an underground room wired with hundreds of electric lights, operated by power stolen from the city's electric grid. He reflects on the various ways in which he has experienced social invisibility during his life and begins to tell his story, returning to his teenage years.
The narrator lives in a small Southern town and, upon graduating from high school, wins a scholarship to an all-black college. However, to receive it, he must first take part in a brutal, humiliating battle royal for the entertainment of the town's rich white dignitaries.
One afternoon during his junior year at the college, the narrator chauffeurs Mr. Norton, a visiting rich white trustee, out among the old slave-quarters beyond the campus. By chance, he stops at the cabin of Jim Trueblood, who has caused a scandal by impregnating both his wife and his daughter in his sleep. Trueblood's account horrifies Mr. Norton so badly that he asks the narrator to find him a drink. The narrator drives him to a bar filled with prostitutes and patients from a nearby mental hospital. The mental patients rail against both of them and eventually overwhelm the orderly assigned to keep the patients under control, injuring Mr. Norton in the process. The narrator hurries Mr. Norton away from the chaotic scene and back to campus.
Dr. Bledsoe, the college president, excoriates the narrator for showing Mr. Norton the underside of black life beyond the campus and expels him. However, Bledsoe gives several sealed letters of recommendation to the narrator, to be delivered to friends of the college in order to assist him in finding a job so that he may eventually earn enough to re-enroll. The narrator travels to New York and distributes his letters, with no success; the son of one recipient shows him the letter, which reveals Bledsoe's intent to never admit the narrator as a student again.
Acting on the son's suggestion, the narrator seeks work at the Liberty Paint factory, renowned for its pure white paint. He is assigned first to the shipping department, then to the boiler room, whose chief attendant, Lucius Brockway, is highly paranoid and suspects that the narrator is trying to take his job. This distrust worsens after the narrator stumbles into a union meeting, and Brockway attacks the narrator and tricks him into setting off an explosion in the boiler room. The narrator is hospitalized and subjected to shock treatment, overhearing the doctors' discussion of him as a possible mental patient.
After leaving the hospital, the narrator faints on the streets of Harlem and is taken in by Mary Rambo, a kindly old-fashioned woman who reminds him of his relatives in the South. He later happens across the eviction of an elderly black couple and makes an impassioned speech that incites the crowd to attack the law enforcement officials in charge of the proceedings. The narrator escapes over the rooftops and is confronted by Brother Jack, the leader of a group known as "the Brotherhood" that professes its commitment to bettering conditions in Harlem and the rest of the world. At Jack's urging, the narrator agrees to join and speak at rallies to spread the word among the black community. Using his new salary, he pays Mary back the rent he owes her and moves into an apartment provided by the Brotherhood.
The rallies go smoothly at first, with the narrator receiving extensive indoctrination on the Brotherhood's ideology and methods. Soon, though, he encounters trouble from Ras the Exhorter, a fanatical black nationalist who believes that the Brotherhood is controlled by whites. Neither the narrator nor Tod Clifton, a youth leader within the Brotherhood, is particularly swayed by his words. The narrator is later called before a meeting of the Brotherhood and accused of putting his own ambitions ahead of the group. He is reassigned to another part of the city to address issues concerning women, seduced by the wife of a Brotherhood member, and eventually called back to Harlem when Clifton is reported missing and the Brotherhood's membership and influence begin to falter.
The narrator can find no trace of Clifton at first, but soon discovers him selling dancing Sambo dolls on the street, having become disillusioned with the Brotherhood. Clifton is shot and killed by a policeman while resisting arrest; at his funeral, the narrator delivers a rousing speech that rallies the crowd to support the Brotherhood again. At an emergency meeting, Jack and the other Brotherhood leaders criticize the narrator for his unscientific arguments and the narrator determines that the group has no real interest in the black community's problems.
The narrator returns to Harlem, trailed by Ras's men, and buys a hat and a pair of sunglasses to elude them. As a result, he is repeatedly mistaken for a man named Rinehart, known as a lover, a hipster, a gambler, a briber, and a spiritual leader. Understanding that Rinehart has adapted to white society at the cost of his own identity, the narrator resolves to undermine the Brotherhood by feeding them dishonest information concerning the Harlem membership and situation. After seducing the wife of one member in a fruitless attempt to learn their new activities, he discovers that riots have broken out in Harlem due to widespread unrest. He realizes that the Brotherhood has been counting on such an event in order to further its own aims. The narrator gets mixed up with a gang of looters, who burn down a tenement building, and wanders away from them to find Ras, now on horseback, armed with a spear and shield, and calling himself "the Destroyer". Ras shouts for the crowd to lynch the narrator, but the narrator attacks him with the spear and escapes into an underground coal bin. Two white men seal him in, leaving him alone to ponder the racism he has experienced in his life.
The epilogue returns to the present, with the narrator stating that he is ready to return to the world because he has spent enough time hiding from it. He explains that he has told his story in order to help people see past his own invisibility, and also to provide a voice for people with a similar plight: "Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"
Underlying Meanings
In the book Invisible Man, the ideology of not being seen as his true self deeply influences the narrator. He is given several identities to conform to throughout the novel, none of which he feels is his true identity, leading him to the understanding of being invisible. "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me" (Ellison 3). After diving in and investing greatly in roles placed upon him by society, and still feeling "unseen" he begins to sometimes believe he had actually been a figment of imagination. He has referred to his life as a dream where others were sleepwalking, and he was a character who could not be seen. As the prologue comes to an end, the narrator explains where he is now in life living in the basement of a “white only” apartment complex. Here he embraced the ideas of being invisible as he lives unnoticed and undetected underground, coming only to the outside world through a hole in the ground.
As said in the first chapter, "All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was… I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions, which I, and only I, could answer" (Ellison 15). This phenomenon can be further explained by Fehmida Manzoor's study stating, "Human identities get shaped and constructed in society through social discursive practices…The 'signs' in a social setup infuse certain ideologies to frame identities of center and margin and these signs get expressed by discourse through human behavioral patterns." He had let the societal norms dictate his character and what he would make out of himself. This quote brings about another underlying meaning to the text through the collection of items that give him a sense of identity. Along this journey, he seems to compile many trinkets that indicate his personal insecurity, such as things given to him or things that make him feel of greater value. In his briefcase, he kept things that gave him a sense of individuality. Among these things kept were the identify that the Brotherhood had given to him and a pair of sunglasses that made him look and feel like Rineheart. The collection of these items gives deeper meaning to the underlying feeling of the narrator's unfound identity.