Nabeel's Blog

"two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up." Schoolteacher in a nutshell. Schoolteacher arrives with his nephews to manage Sweet Home after the death of Mr. Garner . He seems to be an educated person but is very cruel from the start. He uses tactics of conventional slavery on the slaves of the plantation to replace what he saw as Garner’s too-soft approach. His oppressive regime of rigid rules and strict punishment reminded me how horrible slavery truly was. Being the only purely evil character in the novel, Schoolteacher is frightening for his detached and methodical cruelty. Not only does he beat and abuse his slaves, but he also takes notes on their actions and studies them like animals. He seems, literally, to see them as animals. His pursuit of certain "knowledge" is especially disturbing, because it demonstrates a horrifying justification for racism, leading ...

The amount of difference we see in the prologue/epilogue narrator from the chapter 1 narrator is incredible. Having survived numerous traumatic experiences, he can now reflect on his life with a sense of objectivity that he was unable to achieve before. Along with this, he has also achieved a clarity of vision that enables him to see things from a different perspective. The narrator's remark regarding his "belated appreciation of the crude joke that had kept me running" reveals his advanced emotional maturity. Despite the torture he was forced to endure, he is still alive. In my opinion, this suggests that living in a world that denies an individual basic human rights is a fate worse than death. He reiterates his stance, "I'm invisible, not blind." Concerning his reasons for writing down his story, the narrator realizes that the process of writing helped him work through the pain, diffuse the hate, and regain his capacity to love. Once more, he ...

While reading Invisible Man , I’ve found myself relating to the narrator of Invisible Man . This is a strange experience for me, and I often question myself for feeling this way. For one thing, I am not black, nor am I living in a systematically racist society. I am a spoiled child of a wealthy family in 2019. But somehow , even with our extreme differences, when I read Ralph Ellison’s  descriptions of the narrator’s thoughts and actions, it is hard for me to not see myself in him.  What this means for me is that when Ellison describes the narrator’s experiences with the Brotherhood or Ras, I imagine what I would do if placed in similar situations. I become one with the narrator in ways that, given my racial and historical identities, seem impossible. The cause of this is my role as sympathetic reader. The result is a moving experience for the reader. In chapter 1, I distanced myself from the narrator and watched him conform to heavily racist ideals, Now, I feel a...

When the narrator gets his long awaited job at Liberty Paints, we truly begin to see how things are in the North, as opposed to the South where the narrator had lived all his life. Through the symbol of Liberty Paints, Ellison shows how racism had the power to cover up and possibly destroy one's identity. The Liberty Paints plant serves as a complex model of American society with regard to races. Like American society, it is based on the ideals of liberty for all, yet racism is prominent within it. When entering the plant the narrator sees a massive electric sign with the words "Keep America Pure with Liberty Paints". However, "Optic White" is seemingly the only paint produced there, or is the only paint mentioned in the novel. This reflects on the white man's dominance in American society. In addition, Lucius Brockway, the man in charge of the underground section of the plant where the paint base is made, informs the narrator that the main quality of the ...

Throughout the first book of “Native Son”, Richard Wright spends a huge portion solely to showing the life of Bigger Thomas and his environment. Ralph Ellison does the same for the narrator of “Invisible Man.” As I read the first chapter of “Invisible Man”, I slowly discovered the abundance of similarities between the two. The social environment and surroundings where both characters are forced to live ultimately affects their actions throughout their daily lives. We saw what it did to Bigger in "Native Son", and we are beginning to see it with the narrator of “Invisible Man” and his experiences. Both characters are reactive to their environments, rather than taking action on their own. Both are essentially personifications of their environment, but are drastically different in the way that they deal with their racist surroundings. Bigger Thomas’ environment in Chicago teaches him to despise white people and he tries to do anything he can to not feel inferior. The narrator ...