Invisible Man analysis

He attended Tuskegee institute where he studied music. He later worked as a researcher and writer for the New York Federal Writers program under the mentorship of Alain Locke, Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. He has written various works such as the Invisible Man, Shadow and Act, Going to the Territory, Juneteenth and The Collected Essays. Invisible Man is the greatest of all by this author. The narrator in the Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, displays this idea since he acts like a machine rather than a human being by allowing himself to be controlled by other people. He is unable to realize that he has been trained that meekness is the only way of progress so that the whites can continue using him for their own benefit.

This has been a common strategy that is used by the dominant group so as to suppress the minority in the society. In this, Ellison is trying to show us that in most cases the Blacks were forced to repress the African American culture and adopt that of the whites so as to make some progress (Strayhorn and Terrell, 68). They were usually put in the position of machines, by doing what other people desired with the hope that they will have a life that was better. The students of the college that the narrator attends are manipulated by its administration through the control of their actions and beliefs. According to the narrator, the procedure left his mind blank and he was not in a position to think properly.

A machine could be defined as a device that is created to only help people in their tasks. The narrator is unable to recall his name and this proves his lack of identity. This shows that the narrator is more of a machine than a human. The narrator had no identity mainly because his sense of identity was only based on what the college had taught him and the beliefs it had forced him to follow. The Brotherhood completely convert the narrator since he changes what he wears, eats and also where he lives. This is actually a symbol of the control that the whites had over the blacks during that era. The African Americans had difficulty in upholding certain standards that were controlled by the dominant groups.

According to the narrator, Brother Jack says, “you are a soldier now, your health belongs to the organization,” (Ralph, 360). This means that whatever the narrator had or did belonged to the organization, and he thus had to live for the Brotherhood organization and not for himself. What he now intended was to free himself instead of having others free him. It is only after the narrator accepts that he is invisible and recognizes his identity is he able to stop being a puppet and a machine that is under the control of other people (Forey and Barbara). He therefore vows that he must live for himself but not live for others. He therefore burns the slip of paper that contains his identity as a member of the Brotherhood that had been given to him by Brother Jack.

This shows that he is going to follow his own identity and stop others from controlling his life. The narrator serves as a puppet and machine of his race until he realizes the importance of discovering his identity. He spends almost his entire life being operated and influenced by other individuals until he realizes how to control his identity at the end of the novel. By doing so, the narrator is able to visualize the reality of the issues that are associated to blindly following the group that is dominant in the society. The author uses the narrator to symbolize hope and progress among the African Americans. His journey from a puppet to an individual human who is able to recognize his identity shows the struggles that the African Americans go through when trying to reject the inferior positions they have been classified in the society.