Yams, The Brotherhood, and the Narrator’s Identity

        One of my favorite scenes in Invisible Man so far is the scene in which the narrator enjoys a baked yam from a street vendor. It represents him becoming comfortable with his true self, and no longer being embarrassed of the part of his identity that developed during his childhood in the South. He laughs at the older version of himself who was too ashamed of his Southern roots to enjoy pork chops, grits, eggs, and biscuits at the diner. I felt that this was a big step for the narrator and it showed that he had grown a lot. However, his new attitude was short-lived, and everything started going downhill when he joined the Brotherhood.

Immediately, the Brotherhood aims to completely leave the narrator’s identity behind and replace it with an identity that they created to fill a role. They give him a whole new name, and tell him that he’s going to be the new Booker T. Washington. When he starts speaking in a way that doesn’t align with the Brotherhood’s rhetoric well enough, they send him away to Brother Hambro to indoctrinate him with their values. Evidently, the Brotherhood wants the narrator to be someone completely different than who he really is, and force the narrator to abandon his true self for their approval. 

This abandonment seems to haunt the narrator almost immediately--the very morning after he’s given a new name, he encounters the coin bank, which I think represents his true identity. If this is the case, him destroying the bank would mean that he’s becoming ashamed of his past again (so soon after becoming proud of it during the yam scene!). On top of that, he fails multiple times to throw it away, which would mean that no matter what he does, he will never be able to get rid of that part of himself--in this way, I think the coin bank serves as a warning of what the Brotherhood is doing to the narrator.

I think the chain link that Brother Tarp gives the narrator has a similar effect as the coin bank. Just like the coin bank does for the narrator, I think the chain link represents Brother Tarp’s past, and the part of his identity that formed while he dragged a chain around for nineteen years. He always carries the chain link with him, representing the way that your past always stays with you and will always stay with the narrator. Additionally, Brother Tarp walks with a limp, even though he doesn’t drag the chain anymore--I think this is warning the narrator that your past will always affect you and that it will always be a part of his identity. 

This sequence of events intrigued me--first the narrator momentarily comes to terms with his past and accepts his identity, then he is forced to discard his identity and adopt an entirely new one, and finally he is warned multiple times that what he's doing isn’t going to work out. Ellison seems to be highlighting the importance of the idea of the narrator’s identity and him potentially losing it. If he does lose it, maybe that’s when he becomes invisible, because no one will be able to see his true self. If this is the nature of the invisibility that the narrator has in the prologue, would that mean that the narrator ends up completely abandoning his past, despite the coin bank and chain link warning him that he won’t be able to? I’m excited to see how this plays out, and how Ellison further connects the ideas of the narrator’s true identity and his invisibility. 

Comments

  1. EllaOctober 14, 2021 at 1:19 PM

    All your points are really interesting to me. We see the briefcase become a device for lugging around the pieces of his past. He even runs back into the burning building to save it. However, I found it interesting that he starts burning the items of his briefcase to light his way underground. He's been carrying all these parts of his past around for so long, and suddenly gets rid of them. What does that mean for the narrator's future? I wonder.

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  2. SAhmad DastOctober 22, 2021 at 7:48 PM

    So do you think that the narrator would have reached his "enlightened" state in the prologue much sooner if he hadn't joined the Brotherhood, or do you think this period of regression helped him out in the end? Personally I think that while he would have been much more aware of his situation and his own invisibility, he wouldn't be at the level of the prologue narrator without the Brotherhood. The bad experiences in the Brotherhood forged him into the man he would become. Maybe without falling into the manhole, he never would've reached the conclusion about his own life and stayed in the dark.

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