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What Is being Invisible?

I'm kind of lost on what it means to be invisible. I feel as though I might have a grasp of it. In the case of the narrator it is to move through a crowd unseen or be so generic that no one recognizes you. Invisibility in this book reminds me of the Lego Movie, where the main character was so plain, that they couldn't use satellites to find him and perhaps the author intends for invisibility to be like that. What irritates me is that the concept is brought up so little in a book that is named after the concept. Maybe he'll awaken some kind of beastly persona and go on a crime spree and just blend back into the crowd. He probably won't, but it would be interesting to see him get away with more stuff, like how he beat up some guy in the very start of the book and got away with.

I can kind of relate to Inviso Man, I sometimes go unseen until I'm needed as well. You can easily dip in and out of shadows if you please, and only when someone needs you for their own gain does it ever seem like they're trying to uncover your invisibility cloak. Of course they don't get it off you and as soon as you give them all they want, they cut you loose. I think I might write an essay on the concept of what it means to be invisible and when does the author reference it within the novel. I also don't think that anyone brought this up in the class, but maybe his grandfather was invisible all along. Maybe his grandfather's advice in the beginning of the book was in reference to him being invisible all his life and how he regrets it, or maybe how the invisibility took him over and he couldn't see who he really was or what he had become (until it was too late/on his deathbed).

Comments

  1. ZonaOctober 2, 2018 at 7:39 PM

    You're right, invisibility is weird and kind of means a lot of things. I've kind of understood it as people casting a role for you in their minds without your consent. Like, you're someone, but to the people around you you're someone completely different. The Brotherhood casts the narrator in a role, but the narrator is someone they don't care about. They have an idea of who he is, but the narrator has a different idea of who that is. In addition, the Brotherhood doesn't really have the capacity to understand the narrator's experience of being black. Like even if they tried/were more empathetic, they're still limited because they don't live through the same eyes and experience.

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  2. BetsyOctober 2, 2018 at 8:19 PM

    I think this was Howe's critique too. For a book about invisibility, there's a whole lot in it that isn't a direct explanation of invisibility. Like, it's great to know a person's life story and how that shapes them into someone who can think critically and develop a consciousness, but it's hella frustrating when the book ends by the character saying, "Man, good think I now have the groundwork to develop a consciousness. //epilogue//: "Man, I'm so glad I have a consciousness now! Maybe you can do the same thing! I speak for you lol." What conclusions does he come to?? "Invisibility" is as vague as the Brotherhood's political ideas.

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  3. SolomiaOctober 8, 2018 at 9:16 PM

    I was also thinking about this earlier – although the book mentions invisibility a lot, it doesn’t ever really define it. The narrator never sits down and realizes “Oh! I’m invisible because I am x, y, and z!” rather, we see him realize he is invisible after an event triggers it, and then we watch his reaction. I think this is the reactionary nature of our narrator that we never get a clear cut definition of his invisibility, and so even the terms of his invisibility are invisible to us.

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