Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
Racism as an Obstacle to Individual Identity
As the narrator of Invisible Man struggles to arrive at
a conception of his own identity, he finds his efforts complicated
by the fact that he is a black man living in a racist American society.
Throughout the novel, the narrator finds himself passing through
a series of communities, from the Liberty Paints plant to the Brotherhood,
with each microcosm endorsing a different idea of how blacks should
behave in society. As the narrator attempts to define himself through
the values and expectations imposed on him, he finds that, in each
case, the prescribed role limits his complexity as an individual
and forces him to play an inauthentic part.
Upon arriving in New York, the narrator enters the world
of the Liberty Paints plant, which achieves financial success by
subverting blackness in the service of a brighter white. There,
the narrator finds himself involved in a process in which white
depends heavily on black—both in terms of the mixing of the paint
tones and in terms of the racial makeup of the workforce. Yet the
factory denies this dependence in the final presentation of its
product, and the narrator, as a black man, ends up stifled. Later,
when the narrator joins the Brotherhood, he believes that he can
fight for racial equality by working within the ideology of the
organization, but he then finds that the Brotherhood seeks to use
him as a token black man in its abstract project.
Ultimately, the narrator realizes that the
racial prejudice of others causes them to see him only as they want
to see him, and their limitations of vision in turn place limitations
on his ability to act. He concludes that he is invisible, in the
sense that the world is filled with blind people who cannot or will
not see his real nature. Correspondingly, he remains unable to act
according to his own personality and becomes literally unable to
be himself. Although the narrator initially embraces his invisibility
in an attempt to throw off the limiting nature of stereotype, in
the end he finds this tactic too passive. He determines to emerge
from his underground “hibernation,” to make his own contributions
to society as a complex individual. He will attempt to exert his power
on the world outside of society’s system of prescribed roles. By
making proactive contributions to society, he will force others
to acknowledge him, to acknowledge the existence of beliefs and
behaviors outside of their prejudiced expectations.
The Limitations of Ideology
Over the course of the novel, the narrator realizes that
the complexity of his inner self is limited not only by people’s
racism but also by their more general ideologies. He finds that
the ideologies advanced by institutions prove too simplistic and
one-dimensional to serve something as complex and multidimensional
as human identity. The novel contains many examples of ideology,
from the tamer, ingratiating ideology of Booker T. Washington subscribed
to at the narrator’s college to the more violent, separatist ideology
voiced by Ras the Exhorter. But the text makes its point most strongly
in its discussion of the Brotherhood. Among the Brotherhood, the
narrator is taught an ideology that promises to save “the people,”
though, in reality, it consistently limits and betrays the freedom
of the individual. The novel implies that life is too rich, too
various, and too unpredictable to be bound up neatly in an ideology;
like jazz, of which the narrator is particularly fond, life reaches
the heights of its beauty during moments of improvisation and surprise.
The Danger of Fighting
Stereotype with Stereotype
The narrator is not the only African American in the book
to have felt the limitations of racist stereotyping. While he tries
to escape the grip of prejudice on an individual level, he encounters
other blacks who attempt to prescribe a defense strategy for all
African Americans. Each presents a theory of the supposed right
way to be black in America and tries to outline how blacks should
act in accordance with this theory. The espousers of these theories
believe that anyone who acts contrary to their prescriptions effectively
betrays the race. Ultimately, however, the narrator finds that such
prescriptions only counter stereotype with stereotype and replace
one limiting role with another.
Early in the novel, the narrator’s grandfather explains
his belief that in order to undermine and mock racism, blacks should
exaggerate their servility to whites. The narrator’s college, represented
by Dr. Bledsoe, thinks that blacks can best achieve success by working industriously
and adopting the manners and speech of whites. Ras the Exhorter
thinks that blacks should rise up and take their freedom by destroying
whites. Although all of these conceptions arise from within the
black community itself, the novel implies that they ultimately prove
as dangerous as white people’s racist stereotypes. By seeking to
define their identity within a race in too limited a way, black
figures such as Bledsoe and Ras aim to empower themselves but ultimately
undermine themselves. Instead of exploring their own identities,
as the narrator struggles to do throughout the book, Bledsoe and
Ras consign themselves and their people to formulaic roles. These
men consider treacherous anyone who attempts to act outside their
formulae of blackness. But as blacks who seek to restrict and choreograph
the behavior of the black American community as a whole, it is men
like these who most profoundly betray their people.
