Winter Lit Analysis: The Invisible Man

1. In this book a nameless African American man recounts how he became invisible to society. His story starts off with him being a model black citizen, one who was subjugated by white men. His subjugation brought him to college where his own people screwed him over and he was expelled from the school never to return. He goes to New York to find a job and his bitter and rage sets in as he is told he can't work. He is taken in by a woman only to leave after making some good money. He joins the Brotherhood and gains respect from the Harlem community, causing him to move out of Harlem due to the Brotherhood. When he returns, he finds Harlem in shambles with everything he created gone. When he sees a man shot dead, he runs into a man named Ras the Exhorter and learns that he can have many identities when he pretends to be a man named Rhinehart. Eventually Harlem erupts into a race riot. As he tries to escape, he falls down a manhole and decides to recount his story and attack the Brotherhood. By recounting this story, he is ready to become visible and hopes that his story has inspired our visibility as well.
2.  The novel portrays a man who is told and defined by society around him. He has many names or identities: a nigger, a fink, etc. He even goes along with these names despite the stinging connotation they bring. He was the model black citizen and let himself be defined by white men and his own race. He wore the nametag that was placed on him. By recounting his journey, the invisible man come to understand that he was defined by what society told him to be and he seeks to change that. He is going to emerge from his invisibility with his identity, not anybody else's.
3. The author has a rhythmic tone that is characterized by a sarcastic depression. The invisible man is reflecting on his previous life and while he is recalling it, he comes off as bitter about how he used to be but accepts it now.
"One night I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps because of the near darkness he saw me and called me an insulting name. I sprang at him, seized his coat lapels and demanded that he apologize. He was a tall blond man, and as my face came close to his he looked insolently out of his blue eyes and cursed me, his breath hot in my face as he struggled. I pulled his chin down sharp upon the crown of my head, butting him as I had seen the West Indians do, and I felt his flesh tear and the blood gush out, and I yelled, "Apologize! Apologize!" But he continued to curse and struggle, and I butted him again and again until he went down heavily, on his knees,
profusely bleeding. I kicked him repeatedly, in a frenzy because he still uttered insults though his lips were frothy with blood. Oh yes, I kicked him! And in my outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat, right there beneath the lamplight in the deserted street, holding him by the collar with one hand, and opening the knife with my teeth -- when it occurred to me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far as he knew, was in the midst of a walking nightmare! And I stopped the blade, slicing the air as I pushed him away, letting him fall back to the street. I stared at him hard as the lights of a car stabbed through the darkness. He lay there,
moaning on the asphalt; a man almost killed by a phantom. It unnerved me. I was both disgusted and ashamed. I was like a drunken man myself, wavering about on weakened legs. Then I was amused. Something in this man's thick head had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life. I began to laugh at this crazy discovery. Would he have awakened at the point of death? Would Death himself have freed him for wakeful living? But I didn't linger. I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself. The next day I saw his picture in the Daily News, beneath a caption stating that he had been "mugged." Poor fool, poor blind fool, I thought with sincere compassion, mugged by an invisible man!" Here the narrator is bitter because he wanted to kill the man. He expected an apology and got none because of his invisible nature.
"For instance, I have been carrying on a fight with Monopolated Light & Power for
some time now. I use their service and pay them nothing at all, and they
don't know it. Oh, they suspect that power is being drained off, but they
don't know where. All they know is that according to the master meter back
there in their power station a hell of a lot of free current is disappearing
somewhere into the jungle of Harlem. The joke, of course, is that I don't live
in Harlem but in a border area. Several years ago (before I discovered the
advantage of being invisible) I went through the routine process of buying
service and paying their outrageous rates. But no more. I gave up all that,
along with my apartment, and my old way of life: That way based upon the
fallacious assumption that I, like other men, was visible. Now, aware of my
invisibility, I live rent-free.." Again he shows his hatred towards people's abuse of African Americans. He uses his invisibility to his advantage to get what he wants and it makes him laugh.
""Ah," I can hear you say, "so it was all a build-up to bore us with
his buggy jiving. He only wanted us to listen to him rave!" But only partially
true: Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were,
what else could I do? What else but try to tell you what was really
happening when your eyes were looking through? And it is this which
frightens me:
Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" The invisible man knows that we will read his story with conviction causing him to be incredibly sarcastic in his tone of voice. He knows ans yet expects nothing to change.

4. Anaphora- "I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted
Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a
man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be
said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people
refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus
sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard,
distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings,
themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and
anything except me."

Metaphor: "Yes, full of light. I doubt if there

is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not

exclude Broadway. Or the Empire State Building on a photographer's dream night."

 Irony-
"Yes, full of light. I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway. Or the Empire State Building on a photographer's dream night. But that is taking advantage of you. Those two spots are among the darkest of our whole civilization -- pardon me, our whole culture" Aphorism-
"The truth is the light and light is the truth." Allusion-
"Though invisible, I am in the great American tradition of tinkers. That makes me kin to Ford, Edison and Franklin." Anecdote- "look at quote in 3"

Simile- "I guess now it ain't nothing but knowing how to say what I got up in my head. But it's a hard job, son. Too much is done happen to me in too short a time. Hit's like I have a fever."

 Rhetorical Question- "What did I do to be so black and blue?"
 Personification of invisibility:"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted
Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a
man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be
said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people
refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus
sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard,
distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings,
themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and
anything except me."

Verse- An old man singing on the side of a road.
"She's got feet like a monkey

Legs like a frog -- Lawd, Lawd!

But when she starts to loving me

I holler Whoooo, God-dog!

Cause I loves my baabay,

Better than I do myself . . ."

CHARACTERIZATION 
1.
Direct: the author doesn't use this because the narrator is the invisible man.

Indirect:

"I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. Then too, you're constantly being bumped

against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time.You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And,alas, it's seldom successful." Here the invisible man states his invisibility. Invisible does not mean some magical Harry Potter cloak. It means that he is ignored and this ignorance brings light to him about his situation. He is an introvert of society, someone who lurks the shadows taking what it needs.

"I almost laughed into the phone when I heard the director of Men's House address me with profound respect. My new name was getting around. It's very strange, I thought, but things are so unreal for them normally that they believe that to call a thing by name is to make it so. And yet I am what they think I am . . ." Here the invisible man recognizes that he has nametags all over him and in a way he is somewhat enjoying it. He is a person craving identity and accepts what he is thought to be. 
The author uses only indirect characterization because the story is told by the main character. This allows the reader to get into the invisible man's head without any opinions from an all knowing source.
2. The author's diction suits the education of the invisible man. He is somewhat educated but some words he does not know the meaning of. When the author focuses on other characters of his race, diction and syntax descend to an uneducated level. The diction and syntax follow most stereotypes of the language differences between both races. Yet, this is untrue for the invisible man. He is educated and in a way feels above his own race because of what obstacles Bledsoe and the Brotherhood have brought him. When the invisible man talks, his sentence structure is varied with long and short length sentences. This is especially true when he is describing something that made him bitter.
3. The protagonist is a flat, dynamic character. The invisible man is rather simple. He is bitter about what life served him and he wants his identity. The tone of the narrator's voice is blatant and you can tell that his life has brought him a sarcastic bitterness. He was what he hated and life continued to kick him while he was down. Yet the invisible man has changed his outlook while recounting his life story. He saw his invisibility and intends to change that by coming out with his identity. He initially was perfectly fine in subjugation, but now he wants something more than that.
4. " I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am  a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me. Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a bio-chemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. Then too, you're constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful." After reading the book I felt like I had met a person. The invisible man touches on topics known around the world feeling invisible.  His invisibility is the result of the persecution he felt in his lifetime due to the color of his skin. He is bitter and rightly so. He sees this world as being the white man’s world and has been forced to subject himself to invisibility to truly see. The way this man details his experience gives the reader insight into his life and into his journey.