Invisible Man《 隐形人》 英文读后感

Impression of “Invisible Man”

The narrator begins telling his story with the claim that he is an

“invisible man.” His invisibility, he says, is not a physical condition—he

is not literally invisible—but is rather the result of the refusal of

others to see him. He says that because of his invisibility, he has

been hiding from the world, living underground and stealing

electricity from the Monopolated Light & Power Company. He burns

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light bulbs simultaneously and listens to Louis Armstrong’s

“(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” on a phonograph. He

says that he has gone underground in order to write the story

of his life and invisibility.

As a young man, in the late 1920s or early 1930s, the narrator

lived in the South. Because he is a gifted public speaker, he is

invited to give a speech to a group of important white men in

his town. The men reward him with a briefcase containing a

scholarship to a prestigious black college, but only after humiliating

him by forcing him to fight in a “battle royal” in which he is pitted

against other young black men, all blindfolded, in a boxing ring.

After the battle royal, the white men force the youths to scramble

over an electrified rug in order to snatch at fake gold coins. Three

years later, the narrator is a student at the college. He is asked

to drive a wealthy white trustee of the college, Mr. Norton, around

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the campus. Norton talks incessantly about his daughter, then shows

an undue interest in the narrative of Jim Trueblood, a poor,

uneducated black man who impregnated his own daughter. After

hearing this story, Norton needs a drink, and the narrator takes

him to the Golden Day, a saloon and brothel that normally serves

black men. A fight breaks out among a group of mentally imbalanced

black veterans at the bar, and Norton passes out during the chaos.

He is tended by one of the veterans, who claims to be a doctor

and who taunts both Norton and the narrator for their blindness

regarding race relations.

The narrator says that he has stayed underground ever since; the

end of his story is also the beginning. He states that he finally

has realized that he must honor his individual complexity and remain

true to his own identity without sacrificing his responsibility to

the community. He says that he finally feels ready to emerge from

underground.

Themes

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,

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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

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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.

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,

Because he has decided that the world is full of blind men and

sleepwalkers who cannot see him for what he is, the narrator

describes himself as an “invisible man.” The motif of invisibility

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