Final Thoughts on Invisible Man

Upon concluding our final discussion on Invisible Man, I still felt like I had fallen short. There were so many things we could have drawn from it, yet I am still unsure as to which of those were he most important. Was it all black versus white? Was it the individual versus the group mentality? Did the book imply that those who are invisible also have no friends? I felt like we discussed a lot of these ideas as possibilities, yet some of them are mutually exclusive.

First, we compared being invisible to being the president's press secretary. If that's true then it would be unlikely that invisible people would not have friends. If your job is making you invisible, as we argued the Brotherhood did to the narrator, then you are only invisible for those "on the clock" portions of your life. That the narrator did not have friends outside of work or before work (that we know of) it implies that there is something deeper at work.

These keys do not seem to imply, however, that it made the book purely racial. The narrator came across many other African-Americans who did not have the same problem with an identity that he did, even ones who tried to help him on the way. This could only imply that there was something special about him searching for his own identity in solitude, yet that he was constantly having identities forced upon him.

The narrators final revelation comes after having made the only choice he could think of in the situation, to betray the Brotherhood, but that turns out to be negative and leads to his first act of purely free will (though it was in a tight spot) to be a negative one. What does this say about shaping your own untested identity.

For now I must leave the ultimate meaning open. I must agree with Ana, that from a sociological standpoint, the book strikes one much differently than from a literary standpoint.