Are We Still Dreaming?

To me, in all honesty, Invisible Man still has a strangely and profoundly dreamlike character. Our main character continually tries to establish himself, but is undercut in bizarre and nonsensical ways throughout, while even his attempts to slip away from the world provoke strange responses. 

The narrator’s experience with the brotherhood exemplify this pattern extremely clearly. He is promoted to a high office in an organization he does not really understand (nor ever understands or is allowed to understand) and is then repeatedly criticized and shamed for failing to uphold the proper ideals of said organization. Only after one such failure for which he is criticized is he sent to Hambro, to be educated, but we, like with his college experience, see none of this. We learn only that he is successful enough in his education to be given his job back, followed by it being taken away again, and him reassigned to “The Woman Question”. This chapter too, is bizarre. We are given no sense of passing time, but are later lead to infer that months passed with our narrator in Downtown, while all we see is a single day, at some point during these months. 

Our narrator then returns to Harlem, to find that all of his hard work has been completely ruined, and that the Brotherhood, the organization that is paying him thousands of dollars (in today’s money) every month, does not care in the slightest. It so does not care, in fact, that his attempt to fix the situation leads the Brotherhood to crack down on him again, and send him to be reeducated by Hambro once more, who begins trafficking in a variety of racist stereotypes, a side of the Brotherhood previously seen only in the man who is rapidly ejected from the party after asking our narrator to sing a spiritual. 

The narrator at this point grows angry, and goes off, buying a pair of dark sunglasses and a hat, suddenly and instantly transforming him into the larger-than-life legendary figure of Rinehart. He then proceeds to walk around Harlem, entering a series of disjointed and once again dream-like vignettes where he is assigned personalities and identities by random strangers, who he has never met, and whom he does not recognize. Each sees Rinehart in him, but each sees a different person in that Rinehart. The strangers appear and then fade away, the second they confirm that he is not, in fact, the real Rinehart. Rinehart is everywhere, and yet nowhere, as the narrator never meets the real man that the apparent legend is based off of. 

The once again nightmarish situations with the Brotherhood seem to speak to a sense that the Brotherhood is also corrupted by profound American racism, dismissing the narrator’s ideas and sending him to be re-educated whenever he attempts to push for their stated goal of racial equality, but what does the scene with Rinehart say about American society? It clearly speaks to the theme of invisibility, but how does its sense of invisibility tie in?

P.S. Mr. Mitchell I’m super sorry I completely forgot about posting this or actually that I needed to write a blog post at all.