In Invisible Man, we constantly went back
to the theme of the narrator’s conscious. Chapter by chapter, we compared the
current narrator to the one we saw in the prologue, waiting for the evolution
to happen. Over time, we saw how the narrator developed from a naïve graduate
to somebody who knew not to trust people randomly. But did he really change?
To clarify,
let remind you of a scene. When Brother Jack initially comes to the narrator to
recruit him, the narrator immediately goes on guard. The narrator thinks, “Let
him make his own speeches,” (Ellison 294). This change seems like a major
development. I can easily imagine the narrator from the earlier chapters
totally going with Jack. The narrator at this stage is able to deny Jack. The
only reason the narrator goes back to the Brotherhood is to get money to pay
Mary with, which is understandable. What happens next though is strange.
Through whatever process of “education” he went through with Brother Hambro,
the narrator is suddenly all for the Brotherhood. When Jack comes to pick him
up to go get a drink, the narrator tells us, “I was disappointed. I wanted no
drink; I wanted to take the next step that lay between me and an assignment,”
(Ellison 357). All of a sudden the ambitious narrator from the start of the
book is back. The narrator no longer seems wary, but instead eager to impress
Jack. The narrator has made substantial changes to his conscious, but he continually
reverts back to his old form in this scene and other parts of the book as well.
It brings into question, what about the prologue narrator?
As I
mentioned before, we constantly looked back to the prologue narrator as the
narrator who wouldn’t let his ambition and excitement blind him. We expected him to be more reserved, unlike his previous optimistic self. Yet in the epilogue, we
see him lose that. The narrator tells us that “there’s a possibility that even
an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play,” (Ellison 581). It
echoes ominously of the scene of his speech, where he was forced to say “social
responsibility” over and over. He seems like he hasn’t learned from his past,
and pushes forward with his new optimism. The narrator is once again ready to
jump into a situation, and his reasoning seems a bit weak. Is the narrator
ready to return to the surface? Has he really changed?
