The Narrator's New Clothes
I’m back with yet another Invisible Man blog post. Why have I not written on any other book? Not really sure. But, this is a topic that I’ve been wanting to do a blog post or essay about for a while now, because it was extremely noticeable and interesting for me, but never figured out how to turn into a coherent longer form argument. I’m here to talk about clothes in Invisible Man , and their relation to the characters we see and the story overall. As stated in the documentary we watched, Ellison himself paid very close attention to his clothes, and dressed in a very particular, “Ivy” manner. That Ellison paid careful attention to formal clothing is quite apparent throughout Invisible Man , and Ellison repeatedly uses the narrator’s changes of clothes, as well as the clothes of those around him, to send messages about the character’s state and current role in society. The first mention of clothing in the novel comes during the Battle R...