Mr. Invisible

     I've got many problems with this book.
It goes beyond the tough language, the seemingly endless sentences (that usually go on to create their own paragraphs), the sporadic way in which the narrator speaks, or even the narrator's own personal and quite twisted problems he's got going on in his head. No, this I can all deal with. At least, I can tolerate it. But the one thing that really grinds my gears, that I'm constantly reminded of as I open the annoyingly thin pages of this book, is that the narrator's name is never stated. There is no hint nor suggestion of his name anywhere in the 19 chapters that I have read so far. Like the drug commercials coined in their terrifying commercials--not even once.
   
     Of course, it didn't seem like a big deal five chapters in. I kept thinking that his name will pop up somewhere, when Dr. Bledsoe calls him into his office, or when he writes his name for a job application. Anything, really. But it was finally the last straw when I meant to annotate a specific portion of a reading and ended up writing "He told him that he wasn't supposed to go, yet he goes against his own judgement?" Yes. Word for word, an annotation. I don't even know who I'm referring to at this point. It's irritating and distracting for my nit-picky brain that wants to know everything. And of course, the pain of annotating. I've given up on that a couple of chapters later; he's a John Doe in my mind.

     But since all AP Lit books are written by genius authors who probably knew more or less what they were doing, I'm grudgingly guessing that Ellison had justification for leaving the narrator's name tag empty. Besides torturing future AP Lit students with the pain of not knowing, his the narrator's lack of identity from something as simple as his name probably says a lot about the nature of this guy in the first place. From the beginning, we read him as an unidentifiable character, and as I read throughout the chapters I've noticed that I find it easier to identify with his struggles and his pains against society's unbending rules. By avoiding a literal "label" for the protagonist, the author succeeded in having readers sympathizing with this protagonist (even if he strikes me as a little bit of a brat sometimes).

     And by acknowledging this style, the narrator's lack of identity becomes more profound in that his invisibility stems from his worthlessness in this world. Throughout the novel, the narrator loves likening himself to a machine of some sort, or as a minuscule fore in the grand scheme of things. When asked for an interview to represent the goals of the Brotherhood, the narrator replies, "I'm no hero and I'm far from the top; I'm a cog in a machine. We here in the Brotherhood work as a unit" (pg. 396-397). There are many cogs in a machine; you wouldn't waste your time naming each one. Likewise, he identifies himself as part of a unit; that is, he considers himself not even a whole being, but only a part of a larger picture. What is a name for, at this point? He is one out of millions of African Americans, one out of billions of human beings in this world. The absence of a name expounds on this statement that the author is trying to get across. In relation to the mass of humankind, this protagonist is nothing, even though he likes to think he's doing brave and innovational things. When he stands in a crowd with the rest of the population, he is invisible.

     The main point I want to get out of this is that this narrator is not literally invisible. Which, really, is a stupid assumption to make, but I honestly thought he was in the first portion of the book. While he's at school, driving around Mr. Norton, it seems as if John Doe is living through a haze in which he is unsure what is real and what is fake. For all we know, he may be just another patient in Golden Day imagining things, and the rest of the whole story is his fantasy. But his social invisibility, despite all his ambition to reach for the top of the social ladder driving luxury cars and getting people to notice him, is what dominates his life, and I don't think this is necessarily because of his skin color alone. Rather, his constant associations with an organization that doesn't consider each member's individuality is what renders him invisible. And unfortunately, I think this will get the better of him. He'll get so caught up with his self-important that he won't see his quick disposal by the organization once their need of him has run its course. I mean, that's what happened at the school, even though he was one of the university's brightest students; this is what happened when he took a job in a paint factory. I wouldn't be surprised if it happens again, but this time he'll take it so personally that it'll really mess with his head. He'll really start to question his individuality and purpose in the world he lives in. I can't wait for that to happen; then maybe I'll get a name out of him.