Invisible Man entry 1)
This book starts off by
explaining that the narrator is an “invisible man” but “no, I am not a spook
like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I of your Hollywood-movie
ectoplasms” (3). I enjoyed how this book started and it even made me laugh a
little, because when I first learned that we were reading the book Invisible Man I foolishly thought that it
was the book with the actual invisible man. The narrator explains that the fact
that he is an “invisible man” serves him with both pros and cons. It then
continues on to an incident where the narrator runs into a white man who calls
him an insult that the narrator wants him to apologize for. This incident
almost brings the narrator to kill the white man, but he then comes to his
senses and decides to leave. Then after a few other events pass by the narrator
explains a dream that he has in a church where he hears a black woman confess
that she loves her white master for giving her two sons, but then turns kind of
dark when she explains that she poisoned him in order to save him from being “torn
apart” from her sons. What’s the deal with that? Why did these two sons want to
kill their father? It just does not make sense to me at all, and what an awful
dream to have. The narrator then continues on by explaining some of the
narrator’s background starting with his grandparents after the Civil War who
knew that even though they had become free from slavery they still would not be
considered equal to other people during this time in American History and how
this was a struggle that they had. The invisible man then continues on by
relaying the time where he had to give a speech to a group of white men in
which afterwards he was given a scholarship to college and a briefcase. Before the
speech though there was a strange “boxing match” were a naked white woman with
an American flag walked around and the two black boxers were threatened to look
and not look at the woman by different white men. Why was did this incident
occur and did anything like this ever actually happen or is this just something
to make the story more extreme? If anything like this actually did happen then I
am honestly kind of horrified. How did this incident make you feel?
