Nabeel's Blog

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 ...