Dreams of an Invisible Man

       In class this week, we talked extensively about Chapter 1 of Invisible Man as an extended dream sequence, a nightmare that our main character is entirely unaware of, and instead processes as completely normal. I will propose, however, that essentially every chapter has been like this, even the prologue, where we see a seemingly awake and self-conscious character. I think the nature of the dream-like state is different in each of the chapters, but overall each gives off the same feeling of semi-reality. 

We begin in the prologue, where our main character, the narrator, describes himself as an invisible man, who no others can see, and explains that he discovered this for himself. Throughout the chapter, however, increasingly bizarre things come to light about the characters position and actions. First, we learn that he has installed 1,369 lightbulbs in his secret apartment, with which he wages war against the local power company, and is planning on installing something like a dozen record players with associated speakers, so as to be able to overwhelm himself with light and noise while he is writing the story of his life. 

While the main character appears to be fully lucid and in control during these scenes, I am not so sure that this is the case. For one thing, this is simply completely insane. Our narrator has installed an entire office-building’s worth of lightbulbs in his secret underground apartment, in which he blasts music without any of his neighbors ever hearing, and without the power company being able to trace the massive power draw to a single location. How has the narrator not blown the entire building’s fuses? My explanation for this is that the prologue too is at least somewhat in the form of a dream sequence. We accept the strange actions and seemingly non-sensical events as we would in a dream. Ultimately, I suspect that this potentially dream-like invisibility is an aspect of social commentary in the novel, another, but radically different form of the denial of reality to the African-American population by the white majority. 

I think a similar dream-like state can be seen in chapters 2 and 3. In chapter 2, after a brief summary of the narrator’s life at college, which completely excludes essentially all references to his actual college experience, much as a dream might exclude information we would otherwise consider deeply relevant, and push it into the assumed background, we move to the narrator being given a job of supreme importance, which he must not mess up. Instead, the narrator is constantly diverted from his attempts to give a standard tour, going further and further from the college, depriving him of all control. After Mr. Norton’s bizarre ranting speech about the Founder and his legacy, which treats an unknown character with incredible reverence, we simply accept him as a facet of the story as we would in a dream. Ultimately, the nightmare continues for our narrator as all of his worst concerns begin to come to pass. He is stopped by Norton at Trueblood’s house, and, at the end of the chapter, Norton is left barely conscious, forcing the narrator to flee into them next nightmare realm of the bar. In the bar, the insane nature of the narrators reality once again ramps up. Even prior to arrival, they pass a group of veterans who believe they are still at war, and once inside, the narrator simply accepts that the local asylum’s population has been deposited without controls into a bar. The narrators quest for whiskey is delayed by circumstance after bizarre circumstance, much like it might be in a nightmare, until he ultimately fails and Mr. Norton falls unconscious.