Something I noticed after completing Invisible Man was the complete lack of any characters that sympathize with the narrator or have an honest interest in his success. Bigger on the other hand had both Max and Jan, although they didn't truly understand his psyche until the end of the novel. When Bigger first met these characters and others, he was either suspicious or outright angry, unlike the narrator, who was very trusting and eager to please.
It may be that this difference is due to the motivations of the protagonists. The narrator is more concerned with the disillusionment of his preconceptions of his environment while Bigger is trying to carve out his own personal identity. Therefore Ellison is more concerned with the roles in the environment that his secondary characters play rather than their actual relationship with the narrator. Native Son is a lot more about Bigger's psyche in contrast to that of what we see as weak-minded individuals. He is able to pursue his own "accomplishment" in a way that transcends the environment, not particularly interacting with it in anyway. This is of course evidenced by his complete lack of understanding of Max's speech in the court. Even in the end when he embraces Max and Jan as something close to friends, it's on a very personal level, independent of the roles each character might play. The narrator in Invisible Man, for all his resent of being labeled, only really views other individuals through the roles he expects them to fit into. This is likely a result of the narrator's preconception of having to find success by following the rules of the system. Was Bigger able to find personal accomplishment because he had no pre-existent illusions of what success meant? This could be a topic that Ellison and Wright disagree on.
I think that while the Bigger and the Narrator have very different paths when it comes to self-independence, overall they end up in a very similar place. Bigger from almost the beginning is doing his own thing without consideration for what society thinks of him. The narrator on the other hand first tries to conform to what white society wants him to be and then later tries to conform to the Brotherhood. But, then at the end of the book, the narrator has is self-realization moment where he realizes he has to do his own thing, ending up realizing what Bigger realized so much earlier, that you gotta do you own thing.
ReplyDeleteI think that in Invisible Man, there is no way the main character can have anyone who sympathizes with him, and truly wants him to succeed, because the whole premise of the book is that he discovers his "invisibility"; other people don't understand him as a person, and don't care to. The closest thing he has to a person who truly cares about him during his travels, is probably Mary, who he rarely interacts with. That dynamic, that he lacks people that truly support him, is an essential element in his self-realization, whereas for Bigger, realizing that he can open up to some people, and they do understand what he is going through is critical.
ReplyDeleteBigger and the narrator from Invisible Man are fundamentally different characters. They go about their lives differently and I think that the difference is exactly what you talked about in your post. Although I'm sure Bigger had some notions of what success was or could be, he really had no means of achieving that. The narrator has the means to go through college and make a living rising to the top and becoming a respected individual. The difference is the ability to be successful is the real difference.
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