Summary: Chapter Twenty-Two
The narrator returns to his office to find Brother Jack
and the other committee members waiting for him. They are angry
that he has associated the Brotherhood with the protest of Tod Clifton's
death without the committee's approval. Jack informs the narrator
that he was hired not to think but to talk—and to say only what
the Brotherhood tells him to say. The Brotherhood officially regards
Clifton as a traitor to the organization's ideals—Jack cites the
group's alleged objection to Clifton's “anti-Negro” dolls—and would
never have endorsed the eulogy that the narrator gave.
The narrator replies that the black community has accused
the Brotherhood itself of betrayal. Jack says that the Brotherhood
tells the community what to think. The narrator accuses Jack of
trying to be the “great white father.” Just then, one of Jack's
eyes—a false one—pops out of his head into a drinking glass on the
narrator's desk. He informs the narrator that he lost the eye while
doing his duty, stating that his personal sacrifice proves his loyalty
to the Brotherhood and its ideals. The argument winds down, and
the committee takes its leave of the narrator. Jack instructs him
to see Brother Hambro (a white member of the organization) to learn
the Brotherhood's new program.
Summary: Chapter Twenty-Three
The Harlem community's outrage over Clifton's death continues
to build. The narrator passes Ras (once known as “Ras the Exhorter,” he
now calls himself “Ras the Destroyer”) giving a speech. Ras denounces
the Brotherhood for not following through with the momentum that
the funeral sparked. Two of Ras's followers briefly scuffle with
the narrator, but the narrator escapes. In an attempt to disguise
himself and protect himself from further physical attack, the narrator
purchases a pair of sunglasses with dark green lenses. After he
puts them on, a woman walks up to him and addresses him as “Rinehart.”
The narrator replies that he is not Rinehart, and she tells him
to get away from her before he gets her into trouble.
The narrator augments his disguise with a large hat. As
he makes his way back to Ras's meeting, several people address him
as “Rinehart” again. A woman on the street thinks that he is Rinehart,
her bookie; a prostitute thinks that he is Rinehart, her pimp; he
passes a gathering of people waiting for “Reverend Rinehart,” the
“spiritual technologist,” to hold a revival. The narrator is astounded
at his ignorance of Rinehart's identity, with which apparently everyone else
in the community is familiar.
The narrator finally reaches Brother Hambro's apartment.
Hambro informs him that the Brotherhood intends to sacrifice its
influence in the Harlem community to pursue other, wider political goals.
The narrator leaves Hambro's apartment in a fury and decides to
follow his grandfather's advice: he will “yes, agree, and grin the
Brotherhood to death.” He plans to assure the Brotherhood's members
that the community stands in full agreement with their new policy
and to fill out false membership cards to inflate the Brotherhood's
Harlem membership. He also plans to discover the committee's real
goals by cultivating a relationship with a woman close to one of
the Brotherhood's important leaders. He thinks that perhaps he should
try Emma, Jack's mistress.
Analysis: Chapters Twenty-Two & Twenty-Three
At this point in the novel, the narrator finally
loses the illusion that he can remain a free individual within the
Brotherhood. He learns that the condition for membership in the
Brotherhood is blind obedience to its ideology. Just as his college
hired him to show Mr. Norton only what the college wanted Norton
to see, the Brotherhood has hired him to say only what it wants
people to hear, to be like the dancing Sambo doll, playing a role
defined by the Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood's anger over the narrator's eulogy for
Clifton reveals the committee members' own crippling blindness.
If we interpret the white members' motivation for distancing themselves from
Clifton as his connection to the racist dolls, then it becomes clear
that they attach more political importance to a few offensive dolls
than to the murder of Clifton. Ultimately, then, their way of rejecting
racism only reproduces it: they end up condoning a racially motivated
murder in an overzealous attempt to protect the Brotherhood's image
as an antiracist organization. Their alleged idealism trivializes
the concrete reality of racism, as they value the condemnation of
abstract racist stereotypes over the condemnation of a racist murder.
If, on the other hand, we interpret the offensiveness of Clifton's
dolls as a mere pretense that Jack and the others use in order to
break more cleanly from Harlem's interests, then it becomes clear
that they are wholly blind to the undeniable need for the advancement
of black political concerns.
The committee's blindness receives symbolic
representation in the form of Jack's glass eye. Significantly, the
eye falls out precisely as Jack describes the Brotherhood's ideological
position. Thus, it symbolizes both the blindness of the group's
ideology and the group's attempt to hide this blindness. Also significant
is Jack's declaration that the loss of his eye proves his loyalty
to the Brotherhood. The statement reveals Jack's conviction that
blindness constitutes both the prerequisite and the price for full
membership in the organization, for total adherence to its anti-individualist
ideology. Moreover, this scene demonstrates that this blindness
applies not only to the group's followers—such as the narrator—but
also to its leaders.
Rinehart proves one of the strangest and most ambiguous
figures in Invisible Man; though he never appears in the flesh,
he serves as a powerful symbol of the idea of a protean or shape-shifting
sense of identity, against which the narrator's own fragile sense
of identity can be compared. Rinehart is all things to
all people, and those individuals whom the narrator encounters while
he wears his sunglasses impose a variety of identities upon him.
This fluidity of character plays a major role in the narrator's
crucial realization that he is invisible—that he has never had a
self because he has always adopted a self given to him by others.
Glimpsing Rinehart's endlessly malleable self, the narrator realizes
for the first time that he does have his own self. He vows that,
though he may remain invisible to others, he will from that moment
forward be visible to himself. This breakthrough prepares him to endure
not only his disillusioning confrontation with Hambro but also the
hellish night of the Harlem riots and his confrontation with Ras
the Destroyer in Chapter Twenty-Five.
The narrator's conversation with Hambro shatters his remaining illusions
about the Brotherhood. Hambro's description of the Brotherhood's
plans, which prioritize the Brotherhood's larger goals over the
will of the people, is veiled in the same vague, abstract language
as all of the Brotherhood's ideology. Rather than view the Harlem
community as a collection of individuals, the Brotherhood treats
Harlem as a collective mass, an object to be manipulated for its
own ends. Angry that he and his people have been exploited as instruments
to others' ends, the narrator plots, ironically, to manipulate someone
associated with the Brotherhood—namely Emma—for his own ends.
