Invisible Man- FINISHED

Quote Analysis-

"I took the cup and sipped it, black. It was bitter. She glanced from me to the sugar bowl and back again but remained silent, then swirled her cup looking into it. 'Guess I'll have to get some better filters,' she mused. 'These I got just lets through the grounds along with the coffee, the good with the bad'" (323).


This quote, like the endless other references made to color and race in this book, symbolizes the differences and relationship between black people and white people. The black, bitter tasting coffee represents how the narrator is viewed by others as a black man. Black people are seen as a "bitter" race of people as they are stereotyped to be lazy, violent, unintelligent, unimportant, etc. The sugar in this quote is also a racial reference: the sugar is white and sweet-tasting while the coffee is black, impure because it is full of grounds, and bitter-tasting. Most people prefer their coffee with sugar in it because it makes it sweeter and better to drink, which is a reference to the white superiority in the novel. Mary's dialogue about needing to get better filters to separate the good from the bad is symbolic of racial segregation and black inferiority that is present in American society at the time in which the novel takes place.

Symbol- The Briefcase

The briefcase is a symbol of the narrator's journey from the South to the North, during which he searches for an identity and undergoes many character changes and faces many conflicts both with himself and with other people that he encounters along the way. Everything that he works for in order to establish a place in society and a life for himself, from his school in the South to the work he finds when he arrives in Harlem to his involvement with the Brotherhood, is carried in the briefcase. It contains his temporary successes as well as his struggles and disappointments. When he burns the briefcase at the end of the novel, his purpose for doing so is that he needs a light source for the hole that he is living in. The destruction of the briefcase for light represents him ridding himself of the false hope that had been present ever since he left the campus and made his way to Harlem. With this light, he is able to come out of the darkness of the hole, which is ironic since it is the false hope and lies that he carried around with him that enables him to get out of the darkness. He develops as a person as he works to overcome the struggles of false hope that he faces throughout the novel, and this gives him the ability to see the difference between truths and lies.

Reflection:

The length of this book and the, well, ridiculous, amount of symbolism and allusions made it exhausting to read, and by the time I was halfway done with it I was very ready to just hand it back in and not finish it. However, I found it to be an easy book to analyze and discuss, and it was much less stressful trying to comprehend it than it was trying to get through Heart of Darkness twice. Although I thought the book was written very well and the use of symbols were very effective, I do think it became a little excessive. I would have enjoyed reading it much more if it were half the length that it is, because I would have not lost interest in it from reading it for too long a period of time. Also, I did like the themes present in the story and I thought it conveyed a much stronger, clearer message than the majority of the other books we have read this year.