NATIVE SONS OR INVISIBLE MEN?

The Afro-American Search for Identity in 20th-Century America as portrayed in Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and an Adaptation of the Topic for the English Classroom

Diplomarbeit

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Magisters der Philosophie an der Philologisch-Kulturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck

Eingereicht bei Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Gudrun M. Grabher Institut für Amerikastudien

von Mag. Martin Alexander Delucca, BA

Innsbruck, im Februar 2020

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 2

To Be Great Is to Be Misunderstood Ralph Waldo Emerson

In lieber Errinnerung an meine außergewöhnliche Mami

Danke, Sonja, Marco und Nadia. Und Dir, Fabian.

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 3

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface……………………………………………… 5

Introduction………………………………...... 5

1. The White World Is the Right World…………. 11

1.1.White Supremacy………………………………. 16

1.1.1. Institutions and Their Whitewashing 19 1.1.2. White Status Symbols ………………. 26 1.1.3. Meeting the Daltons…………………….. 31

1.2. Black Microcosms: “A Nation Within the Nation” 39 1.2.1. The Southern World in Invisible Man 40 1.2.2. Black Metropolis…………………….. 44 1.2.3. Meeting the Thomases………………….. 50

2. “Running Nigger Boys”………………………. . 53

2.1 Motion in a Static World………………………. 55 2.1.1. Conformity: “I’m Nowhere” ………. 58 2.1.2. Escapism: “Going Nowhere” ………. 63 2.1.3. Supremacist Tendencies: “You Are Nowhere”……………….. 69

2.2. “Machines Inside the Machine”……………… 74

2.3. Communism: Black and Red Brothers?……… 79

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 4

3. Acts of Emancipation and Reconstruction……… 88

3.1. Initiation Rites………………………………...... 92 3.1.1. Bigger’s Blasting of White Walls……… 93 3.1.2. The Erasure of Invisible Man’s supposed Visibility……………………. 99

3.2 Uncle Tom’s Children?…………………………… 104 3.2.1. The Awakening of the Double Consciousness…………………………. 106 3.2.2. The Enlightenment of Invisibility…….. 111

3.3. “Lower Frequencies”…………………………….. 117

4. Conclusion………………………………...... 122

5. An adaptation of the Topic for the English Classroom…………………………………….. 128

5.1 Preliminary remarks……………………...... 128 5.2 Constructivist learning theory…………………... 129 5.3 Aims of the lessons………………………...... 131 5.4 Lesson plans……………………………………. 133

Bibliography………………………………...... 149

Appendix……………………………………………………….. 156

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 5

Preface

The present thesis constitutes a supplement to the original text

“Native Sons or Invisible Man? The Afro-American Search for Identity in

20th-Century America as portrayed in Richard Wright’s Native Son and

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man”. While chapters one to four were handed in as thesis at the University of Innsbruck in 2006 and are listed as reference in the bibliography, chapter five marks a new addition dealing with a practical approach to the topic of identity in the English classroom. Both versions have been supervised by Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Gudrun Grabher, whom I would like to thank for her availability and efficient support.

Introduction

Identity, that is knowledge of oneself, is a basic need everybody longs to satisfy. It is no static entity, but rather a lifelong process of learning, an open-ended and uninterrupted evolution that takes place unconsciously. When one gets to know other people, initially one has a first impression that is mostly limited to appearances. Through communication one observes other traits that one considers to be relevant in order to get to know the other person better. One’s background, nationality, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religious and political affiliations are some examples from an interminable list of criteria that are employed to define oneself and others.

The organisation of society is based on the categorisation and

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 6 consequently on the identification of its members. Society is based on the division of labour, and, therefore, one’s profession is of paramount importance in this process of identification. Furthermore, society consists of a net of groups and movements that facilitate contact between individuals and enable them to express themselves and to get to know themselves. There is an interaction between society and its individual members: one has to follow legal and moral codes imposed by society, and is given the possibility to develop within its frame and to contribute to its modelling.

In our day and age, which is dominated by material values, identity is also turned into merchandise. The media propagate images of how one should look like and behave, and these trends constantly change.

Sometimes one truly gets the impression that the accumulation of material goods constitutes identity, which can supposedly be bought off the peg.

Especially youngsters are easily manipulated to accept the catchphrases of advertisements and to internalise them as universal truths. Yet, as one grows older and accumulates experiences, the real concerns of life become more relevant. One has to choose which path leads to happiness among various options, one has to balance decisions between personal aspirations and communal requests, one has to look inward and to analyse oneself.

Thus, identity is an inner process that involves mind, body, and soul.

Self-reflection is often triggered off by external events that shatter traditional conceptions of oneself: the loss of a loved one, separation or disappointments, but also happier incidents such as a new love or success are some of the catalysts for the scrutiny of one’s self. As a result, one may

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 7 feel alienated from the background one comes from or, even worse, from oneself. Literature offers an abundance of examples of this phenomenon.

Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening is prototypical among them.

The topic of the search for identity is obviously even more prominent in the works of authors belonging to so-called minorities.

American literature comprises a variety of literary productions that spring from marginal artists and that reflect the manifold layers of people that constitute America’s population. Ethnic voices have established themselves in the canon of literature as a distinct artistic way of articulating the peculiarities of their existence. This includes Native Americans, immigrants from South America, the old continent, Asia, and, above all, the Afro-American segment of the population.

In the course of my studies, I have repeatedly had the opportunity to tackle the theme of identity especially in relation to minorities. I have always had a deep interest in this topic, since being part of a minority myself has delineated my entire existence. In my hometown in South

Tyrol, we speak a third language in addition to German and Italian, namely

Ladin. More often than not, emphasis is put on the adherence to one of the three camps and one is judged according to the personal affiliations.

Conflicts between the three linguistic groups have cooled down, but still, stereotypes and related jokes are on the daily agenda when the topic of language comes up, while the benefits of multilingualism are mostly neglected. Personally, I have always been interested in this peculiar background. My studies in English and German have enabled me to observe it even more closely and, hopefully, also more critically.

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 8

Besides linguistic analysis, literature has enabled me to merge myself with characters presented therein that experience a similar situation as I do. Among works of fiction, Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man stands out, as it has provided me with a sort of aha-experience. The book caught my attention straight away first of all due to its mesmerizing narration. Furthermore, the immediate closeness I have felt towards

Ellison’s nameless protagonist has intensified with the unfolding of events in the novel so that, as a result, Invisible Man is the first novel I analyse in my thesis. I have chosen Richard Wright’s opus Native Son as the second

Afro-American novel due to its raw and violent depiction of the search for identity. While Native Son mainly focuses on actions and the consequences they have, Invisible Man is an introspection that incorporates various possibilities of development. In fact, the protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s novel has a choice on how to achieve self-realisation, whereas Bigger

Thomas in Native Son is left with no alternative but to accept an identity that is forced upon him by his environment. Additionally, I have observed that the comparison of the two novels is interesting and rewarding because

Native Son and Invisible Man reflect real-life developments among the black population of the United States.

The initial structure of my thesis was based on the contrast between the peaceful, enduring approach of Invisible Man and the violence of

Native Son. I chose Martin Luther King, Jr. and Marcus Garvey as real-life equivalents to the protagonists of the novels only to discover that, even though their activities appear to be in a binary opposition, the goal they persuade is the same: the freedom to develop, to get to know oneself and

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 9 others, that is the freedom to find one’s own personal identity.

Furthermore, I have come to the conclusion that in order to be able to draw a clear line of division between good and evil or black and white, a measure of subjectivity would be required that I estimate counterproductive. In fact, one of my aims in the present paper is that of unveiling exactly such categorizations as mere subjective constructs that shift according to the perspective from which they are analysed. My thesis therefore investigates the Afro-American search for identity as presented in

Native Son and Invisible Man from a point of view that focuses on common ground between opposites. My aim is to reveal that the categories of black and white are at best hyponyms for numerous other opposites that affect all of us, such as darkness and light, me and you, man and woman, or us and them. Furthermore, I emphasize the fact that these distinctions are a method of attaining and affirming identity for blacks and whites alike.

As far as the concept of identity is concerned, I have decided not to include detailed theoretical speculations in favour of a more pragmatic approach. Instead of introducing the topic in a separate chapter, I have opted to insert the theoretical background gradually and in relation with the scenes that I have chosen to analyse. To discuss identity in detail would go beyond the scope of my paper, and, furthermore, I think that my approach is more individual, as it allows me to be selective and to focus on concepts and passages that I consider to be relevant and telling. Thus, in the selection of issues I have tried to be varied and to arrange them in a way that reveals truths that go beyond the arena of the literary works per se.

In the first chapter, I portray the white world as the right world that

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 10 forms the absolute point of reference to Afro-Americans and their search for identity. This first part of my thesis focuses on the establishment of white supremacy and on the methods that are employed to achieve this goal. I analyse institutions and the tactics they employ to fortify white power structures and to lure members of the black minority to accept and to follow their dictum. Both novels portray characters that apparently have a benevolent attitude towards the black minority. Their attitudes as well as their motivations to contact the black “outcasts” are dealt with in “Meeting the Daltons.” As blacks live within microcosms that are embedded in a white world, yet segregated from it, I investigate the restrictions as well as the amount of freedom blacks enjoy in their limited place in the open, white space. In the second chapter “Running Nigger Boys,” the way blacks react to white supremacy is analysed. The implications a discriminating environment has on the formation of character are examined as well as its effects on interracial relations. The idea behind the entire chapter is that of movement as metaphor of the development the characters of Native Son and Invisible Man undergo. As there is no place for them to go, that is little possibility of development, I present the alternatives they employ to move at all. Still, the white world predominates even in these efforts, and I present this culmination of power and control in terms of blacks as workforce and objects of political theories. The last chapter depicts the transcendence of these imposed limitations. Close contact with the white world unleashes forces in the protagonists of the novels that enable them to free themselves from an over-exposition to whiteness. While they are presented as mere puppets in the first two chapters, in “Acts of

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 11

Emancipation and Reconstruction” the focus shifts to their actions. I analyse events that lead them to change their attitudes as well as the implications the newly gained awareness of themselves has on their search for identity. Finally, I depict the so-called “lower frequencies” of both books, that is the universal aspects they contain.

1. The White World is the Right World

But the horses didn’t want it - they swerved apart; the earth didn’t want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single-file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view and saw Mau beneath: they didn’t want it, they said in their hundred voices, ‘No, not yet,’ and the sky said, ‘No, not there.’

E.M. Foster - A Passage to India

The protagonists of Richard Wright’s novel Native Son and in

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man1 are confronted with a situation that echoes the one described in the above passage. Just like a friendship between the

Indian Dr. Aziz and the English Cyril Fielding is rendered impossible by outside forces which drive them apart, so do Bigger Thomas and Invisible

Man confront a hostile environment which renders their lives difficult not only in terms of their relations with others, but mainly in their understanding of themselves.

Native Son was first published in 1940 and was welcomed with mixed reactions that went from complete rejection to critical acclaim for its content as well as its literary aspects. Set in Chicago, the novel depicts the story of Bigger Thomas, a black youngster who faces huge difficulties to

1 Given the fact that the hero in Ellison‘s novel remains nameless throughout the unfolding of his story, hereafter he is also referred to as ‘Invisible Man.’

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 12 express himself as an individual due to the restrictions he encounters as a member of the black minority. These limitations lead him to murder a white girl as well as his black girlfriend, and he is finally sentenced to death for his crimes. Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man was first published in 1952 to immediate critical acclaim. The protagonist of the novel recalls his series of adventures in the white world from the underground to which he has retired on order to ponder on his condition.

He concludes that he is invisible to people around him due to his black skin, as others refuse to see him as an individual and prefer to project stereotyped images on him instead. Given the development Invisible Man undergoes, the novel can be labelled as a Bildungsroman.

Depicted as common black men of their day and age, common in so far as they face “vast white looming walls”2 wherever they go and are at best regarded as passive, benevolent pawns to be manipulated, at worst considered to be beasts “utterly untouched by the softening influences of modern civilization” (NS 310), Bigger Thomas and Invisible Man may be regarded to be “at the end of a psychological continuum which reaches back in time to their enslaved ancestors” (Grier and Cobbs 24). The implications that the forced and, more often than not, violent integration of

African slaves into the United States has had on later generations of Afro-

Americans, both as a collective group and as individuals, loom ever- present in the back of the minds of both protagonists. In fact, as Ralph

Ellison puts it in the introduction to his novel, “what is commonly assumed to be past history is actually as much a part of the living present as William

2 Richard Wright, Native Son (London: Vintage, 2000) 99. Hereafter

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 13

Faulkner insisted.”3 As a result, every step the protagonists in Invisible

Man and in Native Son and the collective of Afro-Americans they are supposed to represent take, every decision they take and every action they perform is balanced against the frame of a white world in which they are positioned as second-rate citizens due to the colour of their skin. This rank has been internalized by the white, oppressive majority and forced upon the minority of blacks through centuries of “whitewashing” and the imposition of a white-centred perspective upon the way history has unfolded and, as a consequence, the organisation of society. Even though the Emancipation

Proclamation of President Abraham Lincoln in 1863 and the following period of the Reconstruction from 1867 onwards (cf. Fremon 13, 117) were meant to restrict or at best end such black and white schemes, the protagonists in the novels still face a situation in which, in fact,

“Mississippi is anywhere south of the Canadian border” (X 42).

The arena in which the lives of Bigger Thomas and Invisible Man unfold is consequently one based upon appearance and essence or assumptions and realities. On the legal basis, they are full American citizens, yet, in everyday life, they are victims of discrimination due to the colour of thier skin. These dualities shift according to the point of view from which they are observed and, as a result, the perception of the “other” is blurred and distorted. The quintessence of the individual is neglected in favour of images which are used as a means of classification for the entire group of blacks and whites alike. Thus, the world as presented in Native

abbreviated as NS with page numbers in parentheses. 3 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995) xvi. Hereafter abbreviated as IM with page numbers in parentheses.

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 14

Son and Invisible Man is truly “in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue most in request is conformity” (Emerson, “Self-Reliance” 28). However, since the

“shareholders” are predominantly white, the conformity requested from the black segment of the population is imposed upon them by force rather than established in agreement. This process is based on the dictum that “all men are born equal, but white men are more equal than anyone else” (Grier and

Cobbs 144).

The consequences of these conditions for Afro-Americans and their development of a self-concept are obvious when we assume that in order to know who one is and to be able to define one’s identity, the environment in which one moves plays a crucial role. Argyle claims that other people’s estimations of the self, the comparison with other people in the immediate environment as well as the role assigned to oneself by one’s own community (cf. Wyne et al. 18-19) are the basic factors that contribute to the establishment of one’s self-image. George Herbert Mead summarizes these assumptions, claiming that “the self is something which has a development; it is not initially there, at birth, but arises in the process of social experience and activity, that is, develops in the given individual as a result of his relations to that process as a whole and to other individuals within that process” (135).

The social framework may therefore be considered as a prerequisite

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 15 for true self-knowledge, and “the structure of the complete self is thus a reflection of the complete social process” (Mead 144). Given the imposed hierarchy in society which places the Afro-American population on a lower stratum, what Mead defines as “the generalized other” that is “the organized community or social group which gives to the individual his unity of self” (154), could be more appropriately labeled as “general whiteness” or “general colourlessness,” since “the attitude of the generalized other is the attitude of the whole community” (Mead 154). Due to the inferior status within the society in which they move, for Afro-

Americans the process of exchanges in which one’s personality develops is one-sided and grants them restricted opportunities for self-fulfillment.

Bigger realizes his inferior position when he faces Mr. Dalton and feels ashamed, having “an organic conviction in him that this was the way white folks wanted him to be when in their presence” (NS 79). Similarly,

Invisible Man muses upon this dilemma right at the beginning of his recollections:

It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been

looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to

tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were

often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I

was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself

questions which I, and only I, could answer. (IM 15)

The answers provided by the white world as well as the way in which they are spread and presented as universal truths will be analyzed in the following chapters.

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 16

1.1. White Supremacy

On the occasion of his first speech in front of a white audience,

Invisible Man mistakenly pronounces “social equality” instead of “social responsibility” (IM 31). The reaction of the white audience is a rebuke:

Invisible Man is informed the white spectators “mean to do right by [him], but [that he has] got to know [his] place at all times” (IM 31). Set against the background of the Battle Royal, in which the narrator has been degraded to a mere object of amusement, this incident is an initial visualization of the power structures which surround and maneuver

Invisible Man throughout the whole novel. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the two concepts of social equality and responsibility is emphasized throughout the whole scene in the contrast between the passive gaze of the adult white spectators and the adolescent black “actors” who move according to their demand. This grotesque situation powerfully exhibits the doctrine on which white supremacy is based, namely that it is the Negro’s social responsibility not to speak up for social equality.

Bigger Thomas is stuck in a similar, though by far more harmless predicament when he stands in front of the Daltons’ house for the first time. His doubt whether he is to use the front door to present himself to his new employer or rather to slip in through the back reveals far more than his shyness. The two choices open to him mirror the distinction between oppressor and oppressed, that is the fact that “in civilization, history, family patterns, language, art, psychology, the white is always the norm;

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 17 the black is forever the other” (Reilly 1990, 36).

As all power structures regulating society are compressed in the hands of whites, Bigger and Invisible Man face huge difficulties on their way to self-realization which they tackle in their own way. Both of them, however, are filled with a sense of alienation, which increases with the unfolding of events in the novels. This alienation can be seen “as powerlessness, as a reason for the individual believing in the external control of events” (Wyne et al. 50). On the one hand, Bigger is driven by the conviction that the white majority “ruled him, even when they were far away and not thinking of him” (NS 145) in everything he does. The omnipresence and mainly omnipotence of those exerting authority, that is the white segment of the population, is abstracted into an undistinguishable mass, a force of nature which bears resemblances to a sleeping beast that continually threatens to unleash its power over him and destroy him when its attention is attracted.

To Bigger and his kind white people were not really people; they

were a sort of great natural force, like a stormy sky looming

overhead, or like a deep whirling river stretching suddenly at one’s

feet in the dark. As long as he and his black folks did not go beyond

certain limits, there was no need to fear this white force. But

whether they feared it or not, each and every day of their lives

they lived with it; even when words did not sound its name, they

acknowledged its reality. As long as they lived here in this

prescribed corner of the city, they paid mute tribute to it. (NS 144)

While Bigger reacts with hate and fear to his environment exerting power

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 18 over him until these feelings are literally internalized and end “right down here in his stomach” (NS 51), Invisible Man, on the other hand, embodies the principles of Booker T. Washington, for he truly believes in the dictum that it is best to “cast down your bucket where you are” (IM 29). His behaviour is shaped on the assumption that “the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing” (Washington 38).

Whereas Bigger lives his life knowing that, as Elijah Muhammad puts it, “segregation is when your life and liberty are controlled, regulated by someone else” (qtd. in X 348), Invisible Man is just becoming aware that he lives “in a land which views all blacks as bondsmen temporarily out of bondage” (Grier and Cobbs 136; emphasis mine). He is blind to the fact that, as the vet at the Golden Day puts it, “the same they we always mean, the white folks, authority, the gods, fate, circumstances — the force that pulls your strings until you refuse to be pulled any more” (IM 154), exert control over him by subtle means. Ellison’s protagonist embodies the fact that

for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of

a formula than a human being - a something to be argued about,

condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down,’ or ‘in his place,’ or

‘helped up,’ to be worried with or worried over, harassed or

patronized, a social bogey or a social burden. The thinking Negro

even has been induced to share this same general attitude, to focus

his attention on controversial issues, to see himself in the distorted

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 19

perspective of a social problem. His shadow, so to speak, has been

more real to him than his personality. (Locke 161)

Invisible Man realizes that “light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form” (IM 6). The scrutiny of white society as the apparent source of light that creates the protagonist’s “form” or shadow is a prerequisite for this insight. Bigger undergoes a similar process which, as well as his conviction that “this whole vague white world which could do things this quickly was more than a match for him” (NS 254) support the thesis that “it is difficult to imagine how the personality and self-concept of the black-American could fail to be influenced by the experience of caste discrimination based solely upon his skin color” (Wyne et al. 4).

1.1.1. Institutions and Their Whitewashing

Ralph Ellison claims that “the nature of society is such that we are prevented from knowing who we are” (“The Art of Fiction” 177), while

Richard Wright wonders “what peculiar personality formations result when millions of people are forced to live lives of outward submissiveness while trying to keep intact in their hearts a sense of the worth of their personality?” (“Introduction” xxx). Both quotations summarise the concept of control from the outside, which leaves individuals no other choice than to conform to established dogmas. One means to consolidate these power structures is the establishment of institutions. This basic principle in the organization of society provides, first of all, a means of controlling and channeling attitudes and trends within the group it is

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 20 intended to represent and which legitimates its existence. Secondly, individuals are given the opportunity to identify with and to affiliate themselves to institutions, be it an official or a private establishment.

In Invisible Man and Native Son, institutions play an important role in the fortification of white supremacy, in that they reinforce and spread racist tendencies and, as a consequence, prompt their members to imitate and internalize such attitudes so that, as Max asserts in Native Son,

“injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life” (419). In fact, both novels reveal that “in social practice and legal standing, African Americans were invisible to a majority of white Americans and denied access to many of the economic, political and cultural institutions that whites controlled”

(Sundquist 2).

Invisible Man encounters these constraints all along his journey to self-knowledge. At the Battle Royal, “they were all there — bankers, lawyers, judges, doctors, fire chiefs, teachers, merchants. Even one of the more fashionable pastors” (IM 18), that is distinguished personalities who represent sectors such as commerce, jurisdiction, education and even religion. Even though they remain nameless, these figures of authority foreshadow subsequent episodes, such as the sojourn at the factory hospital or the period of education at College. In fact, throughout the novel the protagonist is repeatedly reminded that “this was our world, … this our horizon and its earth, its seasons and its climate, its spring and its summer, and its fall and harvest some unknown millennium ahead; and these its

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 21 floods and cyclones and they themselves our thunder and lightning; and this we must accept and love and accept even if we did not love” (IM 112).

The prototypical exemplification of institutionalized whitewashing in Invisible Man occurs at “Liberty Paints.” At this industrial plant, the protagonist is briefly employed to perform the menial task of adding ten drops of dope to buckets of white colour. To his amazement, in the eyes of his foreman Kimbro the mixture turns out “as white as George

Washington’s Sunday-go-to-meetin’ wig and as sound as the almighty dollar” (IM 201-202). This technique of production as well as the name of the artifact and the slogan used to promote it, “If It’s Optic White, It’s the

Right White” (IM 217), reflect wheelings and dealings which go beyond the plant of production and government as its client. In fact, “Optic White” assumes a metaphorical implication of the condition of the Negro population of the United States and the concept of essence and appearance on which it is based. Just like the black liquid, the black minority is swallowed by the white majority in society, at best in tacit agreement, at worst through violence. Furthermore, the catchphrase used to advertise the product resounds the popular saying that “If you’re white, you’re right. If you’re brown, hang around. If you’re black, get back” (qtd. in Grier and

Cobbs 79), a summarization of how the black segment of the population was expected to behave in society. Finally, the artificiality of the process needs emphasis, for “the purest white that can be found” (IM 202) is basically an illusion restricted to the optic perception, since its creation requires the insertion of elements that are considered to be impure, that is coloured. This inconsistency mirrors the principles of society, where “the

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 22 white becomes whiter by absorbing the Negro’s virility, by using the black to increase the strength of the white” (Baumbach 78).

In Native Son, various episodes reveal the bias with which Bigger

Thomas faces “whitened” institutions. There is the South Side Real Estate

Company and its policy to “keep us the Thomases bottled up here like wild animals” (NS 279) in the Black Belt of Chicago and the police who

“never really searched diligently for Negroes who committed crimes against other Negroes” (NS 44). Furthermore, the Court which trials Bigger is exclusively concerned with the murder of Mary Dalton, presenting the corpse of his second victim, his black girlfriend Bessie Mears, as a mere object of evidence. In these events, the fact that “die rassistisch-soziale

Wirklichkeit wird als ein von Weißen kontrolliertes System von Tabus

(weiße Frau), Privilegien (berufliche Sicherheit, materielle

Verfügungsgewalt) und Kontrollmechanismen (des Verhaltens, der

Sprache und des sozialen Aufstiegs) gezeichnet” (Dietz 65) is visualised as the ordinary condition for Bigger Thomas and his kinfolk.

This partiality is, however, best represented and summarised in the character of the State Attorney Buckley. In fact, he hovers around Bigger from the very beginning of his fateful day when, in a Big Brother-like fashion, the protagonist notices Buckley on an advertisement displaying

“one of those faces that looked straight at you when you looked at it and all the while you were walking and turning your head to look at it kept looking unblinkingly back.” The slogan of this advertisement, namely that “IF

YOU BREAK THE LAW, YOU CAN’T WIN” (NS 43) also foreshadows

Bigger’s fate. Furthermore, the way the State Attorney constructs his cause

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 23 against Bigger at Court gives insight into the world view he represents. The first striking feature is Buckley’s choice of words, which aims at the establishment of distance between Bigger and the white machinery of jurisdiction. By calling him a “black mad dog” and a “hardened black thing” (NS 434), Buckley subsumes Bigger into a subhuman category and annihilates eventual occurrences of identification and sympathy in the white audience. This tactic is intensified with the inclusion of biblical images: “law is holy because it makes us human” (NS 433), Buckley claims, arguing that (white) “Christian kindness” (NS 434) is threatened by

Bigger, a “black lizard scuttling on his belly farther over the earth and spitting forth his venom of death” (NS 433), an “infernal monster” and

“treacherous beast” (NS 436).

Additionally, Buckley uses Bigger as a unit of measurement for the humanity of the society in whose name he equates Bigger’s cause with “the fight for civilization” (NS 403). However, his view is one-sided, for he omits a civilised fight for Bigger who, as his speech implies, is just as much a part of that world. The Jewish lawyer Max uses a similar strategy in his plea for Bigger’s life, arguing that in him “the complex forces of society have isolated … a symbol, a test symbol” (NS 412). However, whereas Max aims at revealing the roots of Bigger’s crime, Buckley contents himself to the presentation of facts and the maintenance of an unspoiled, that is colourless, surface. Additionally, while Max concentrates on universal aspects, Buckley focuses his attention on differences and uses tactics which Balibar describes as follows:

Im Rassismus geht es demgemäß darum, Stimmungen und Gefühle

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 24

zu organisieren …, indem sowohl ihre ‘Objekte’, als auch ihre

‘Subjekte’ stereotypisiert werden. Aus eben dieser Kombination

unterschiedlicher Praxisformen, Diskursformen und Vorstellungen

in einem ganzen Netz von Gefühlsstereotypen lässt sich die

Herausbildung einer rassistischen Gemeinschaft erklären …,

sowie auch die Art und Weise, wie sich gleichsam spiegelbildlich

die Individuen und Kollektive, die dem Rassismus ausgesetzt

sind, dazu gezwungen sehen, sich selbst als Gemeinschaft

wahrzunehmen. (1992, 24)

The media play a relevant role in Native Son in the aftermath of

Bigger’s murders in that they spread and reinforce the prejudices and resentments of the white population towards the black minority to the point that they develop into an “ocean of boiling hate” (NS 296). In their descriptions they attach beastly attributes to Bigger and grant him no human traits in that they seem to be exclusively concerned with blowing up facts into a sensational story that sells well. This results in the fact that,

“together, Mary‘s head and the journalistic discourse assure Bigger‘s death” (Werner 123). “I’m slanting this to the primitive Negro who doesn’t want to be disturbed by white civilization” (NS 244), discloses one of the journalists assembled in the basement of the Daltons’ house, and, consequently, in the newspapers Bigger is presented as “an earlier missing link in the human species. He seemed out of place in a white man’s civilisation” (NS 310).

What is striking is that, on the one hand, the press lacks all objectivity, for the presentation of the facts is one-sided. Bigger is actually

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 25 never given any opportunity to speak up so that the assumed rape of Mary

Dalton is presented as proven fact. On the other hand, resemblances to

Buckley’s tactics become obvious. In fact, the press juxtaposes the brutish

“Negro sex-slayer” (NS 309) with the pure, white world. This depiction contributes to the formation of in- and out-groups. Furthermore, the public outlook on Bigger and blacks in general is distorted, given the attribution of thoroughly negative connotations in their depiction in the media. In contrast to Max, they are blind to the fact that, as Nelson Algren elucidates,

“when a crime is committed by a man who has been excluded from civilization, civilization is accomplice to the crime” (qtd. in Kumasi 50).

On the contrary, the press and the State Attorney support “the social structures creating the subordinate group that can be slurred, while in turn the institutionalised structures of racism reflexively generate racist discourse as their justification” through their “long anecdotal and declarative repetition of the belief that ‘a nigger is a nigger’” (Reilly 1990,

41).

In summary, we can say that white-controlled institutions are a subtle continuation of slavery, for both are “unbelievably efficient in effacing the African and producing the American Negro” (Grier and Cobbs

102). Not only do they segregate the Negro population and grant them no protection, but they also spread resentments against them by turning racist practices and principles into legal measures, so that “die vorbeugende

Behandlung gegen die ‘Krankheit der Vermischung’ findet dort statt, wo die institutionell etablierte Kultur die Kultur des Staates, der herrschenden

Klassen und, zumindest offiziell, auch die der ‘nationalen’ Massen ist, wo

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 26 also deren Lebens- und Denkweise durch die Institution für legitim erklärt wird” (Balibar, “Gibt es einen Neo-Rassimus” 33). As a result, Bigger and

Invisible Man live the lives of outsiders who are “black and at the bottom of the world” (NS 179-180). However, as Mead claims, “institutional functionings of organized human society are also only possible in so far as every individual involved in them or belonging to that society can take the general attitudes of all other such individuals with reference to these processes and activities and institutional functionings, and to the organized social whole of experiential relations and interactions thereby constituted

— and can direct his behavior accordingly” (155). Through the installation of white status symbols, the black minority is given an agency to believe in and to strive for. Furthermore, these status symbols constitute a point of orientation that is, however, founded on the principles of white society and its institutions.

1.1.2. White Status Symbols

Acquiring status within society, that is on the one hand being able to relate to and identify with its values and mores, on the other playing an active role in their establishment and execution, can be considered a primary goal of every individual since, as William James explains, “we are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have a innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favourably, by our own kind” (“The Self” 127). Status is thus the result of an active process ignited by what Marvin D. Wyne terms “man’s primary

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 27 motivational disposition … to produce changes in his environment”

(Wyne et al. 48). Furthermore, Wyne distinguishes between derived status, that is one’s position in society at birth, which therefore depends on the background one comes from, and primary status, which “is accorded individuals for developing executive competencies. That is, primary status is given to individuals who have developed outstanding skills and abilities which they can perform independently of their social position or background” (Wyne et al. 35-36).

Given their inferior position as members of the black minority, for which “birth determined destiny so that the most educated and accomplished black person would rank lower than the poorest white”

(Fremon 25), Invisible Man and Bigger Thomas face immense hurdles in their attempts to express themselves and shape their environment according to their personal aspirations. Not only does white society render the attainment of their goals impossible, but it also submerges their lives in a

“confusion that defines the life of any black man whose language, values, and sense of reality are distorted by their subjection to the symbols that define and control the powerful white world” (Bloom 133-134), symbols which are out of reach for Bigger and Invisible Man. In fact, “Bigger has been driven into a corner like a trapped animal; there society tantalizes him with its rewards but refuses to let him out to share them” (Fishburn 85), while to Invisible Man the path leading to appreciation may be regarded

“as hostile as the gray highway with its white dividing line” (IM 99).

For Bigger and Invisible Man, earning money is one obvious way to attain some degree of power over their environment. The briefcase

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 28

Invisible Man is rewarded with after his first speech “will be filled with important papers,” and we can assume that among them also money is necessary to “help shape the destiny of your people” (IM 32). Yet, the unattainable coins on the electrified rug that turn out to be fake symbolize the difficulty of attaining economic security for blacks. Mrs. Thomas’ reproaches towards Bigger that she and her children “wouldn’t have to live in this garbage dump the one-room apartment they inhabit if [he] had any manhood in [him]” (NS 38) supports this thesis as well, for in she equates her son’s manhood with economic success.

While Bigger admires white people and their ability “to get hold of money, millions of it” (NS 64), his job as a chauffeur for the Daltons is but another dependency upon the white world for Bigger. His mere steering of the Buick visualises this, as it contrasts, for example, Dr. Bledsoe’s possession “of not one, but two Cadillacs” (101) in Invisible Man. For the protagonist in Ellison’s novel, Bledsoe functions as an idol.

He was the example of everything I hoped to be: Influential

with wealthy men all over the country; consulted in matters

concerning the race; a leader of his people; equipped with a good

salary and a soft, good-looking and creamy-complexioned wife.

(IM 101; emphases mine)

Invisible Man is yet unaware that his icon’s striving for success, visualised by the “trophies or heraldic emblems upon the walls” (IM 137) in

Bledsoe’s office as well as the “heavy gold chain” (IM 147) he wears, is still related to the chain link from the times of slavery on the headmaster’s desk. Even though Dr. Bledsoe has polished it up to become a symbol of

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 29 progress to him, it still exhibits his imprisonment in the white world.

Besides money and the display of wealth and power through material goods, white women function as status symbols of uppermost importance in both novels. This becomes clear when Mary Dalton enters her father’s office and reminds Bigger of “a doll in a show window” (NS

94). Even more so, the Battle Royal in Invisible Man reveals the role white women play and the status they are attributed in society. There, the protagonist is forced to stare at a blonde woman with a tattoo of the

American flag on her belly dancing before him. He admits that “had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked” (IM 19). The Gay

Woman, a movie Bigger watches, arouses similar associations, for he muses about possible similarities between the fictional characters and the

Daltons as his future employers. We may conclude that “for the black man, the white woman represents the socially identified female ideal and thus an intensely exciting object for his sexual possession. She has been identified as precisely the individual to whom access is barred by every social institution” (Grier and Cobbs 91).

When Invisible Man is lured to have sexual intercourse with a white woman with the pretense to discuss Communist politics, he realizes that

“the ideological was merely a superfluous veil for the real concerns in life”

(IM 416). This insight not only applies to the woman, “who glows as tough consciously acting a symbolic role of life and feminine fertility” (IM 409), but also to the protagonist himself. In fact, both represent a collective group, the black minority and women, that is stereotyped and objectified by the majority of white men. In Native Son, Bigger and Mary are unable to

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 30 overcome the stereotypes connected to them. Mary dies as “the only thing”

(NS 323) the Daltons had and is even referred to as “bait” by the State

Attorney (NS 349). Bigger becomes the living example of the bias attributed to blacks.

In Invisible Man, the significance of white status symbols is repeatedly downgraded. First of all, symbols are satirized: observing the image of the college founder, Invisible Man muses “why a bird-soiled statue is more commanding than one that is clean” (IM 36); the golden days of the “Golden Day” are long past: the building itself has been converted into a brothel, its customers are shell-shocked veterans who live at the margins of society, looking for relief in a place more “respectable” blacks try to avoid, and white women long to be raped by black men. As a result, we can say that

[h]istorically and politically Invisible Man is beset by a cavalcade

of American symbols and images which are in the wrong places, a

sometimes subtle, sometimes raucous debunking of the names and

institutions which the Americans are supposed to hold so dear: the

American flag upon her belly undulates to the shimmy of a nude,

the identity of Jefferson is an illusion in the mind of a shell shocked

veteran, the Statue of Liberty is obscured in fog while liberty is the

name appellate to a corporate enterprise, Emerson is a businessman,

the Fourth of July is Jack the Communist’s birthday as well as the

occasion of a race riot. (Horowitz 102-103)

Furthermore, at the end of his journey the protagonist burns the contents he has accumulated in his briefcase with time. Among them is, for example,

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 31 his high-school diploma, which was meant to grant him equality through education, as well as the sheet of paper on which his Brotherhood identity is written, a name which attributes him status at least within the party. If we perceive the briefcase and its contents to “represent not only his past identities but the roles the Negro has played in history” (Margolies 1968,

147), the destruction of these objects can be equalled to a final, ideal emancipation of Invisible Man as well as the Negro population. By burning that which others have imposed upon him and what he has achieved in a white-centred society, he expresses his unwillingness to be himself a status symbol of the white world any longer and takes his fate into his own hands, just as Bigger does by killing Mary Dalton.

1.1.3. Meeting the Daltons

In Native Son and Invisible Man, the protagonists meet several characters that, on the surface, seem to confront them with benevolence and understanding. There are those who seek direct contact with Bigger and Invisible Man and try to integrate them in their lives, others who aim at supporting them indirectly, for example with the financial means at their disposal. Nevertheless, as the resolutions of the two novels show, these characters fail in their attempts. In their tentative efforts to establish contact with Bigger and Invisible Man, the protagonists’ individuality is only secondary to the colour of their skin, for they are addressed primarily because of their ethnic background. As a result, these characters disclose that the black man “is not a person in his relations with whites, but a role,

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 32 and furthermore they serve to reveal,” to both Bigger and Invisible Man,

“the kind of role” they play (Klein 94). Since “Daltonism is the scientific term for color-blindness” (Kumasi 60), Mary’s and her parents’ surname

“Dalton” can be used as a hyponym for all characters within the novels who “strive towards color blindness, though they fall tragically short of achieving it” (Kinnamon 1976, 96).

In Native Son, the Dalton family is the prototypical example of internalized white supremacy. “By including them,” in fact, “and by gradually insinuating the ultimate responsibility of the Daltons for the course of Bigger’s life, Wright evades melodrama … and balances the character of Bigger with figures which are representative of the system of oppression precisely because of their white normality” (Reilly 1990, 44).

Whereas initially to Bigger “Mr. Dalton was somewhere far away, high up, distant like a God” (NS 204), the resolution of the plot in the trial scene reveals that his “godly” character traits, that is his charity, good will and generosity, are a mere eyewash. In fact, his ethics are distorted by the assumption that blacks are inferior and can be dealt with accordingly. This results in the rental of ramshackle flats in an area where blacks are kept at safe distance from the white world. Their economic exploitation is an additional side-effect of this process. The fact that eight out of the twenty dollars Bigger earns go straight back to Mr. Dalton as the owner of the

South Side Real Estate Company proves this, and so does his administration of the “corner of the city tumbling down from rot” (NS 204) where the Thomases live. On the surface, Mr. Dalton’s efforts are praiseworthy, for they aim at an improvement of the situation of the Negro

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 33 population in Chicago. Yet, they do not tackle the problem at its roots.

Shortcomings are attributed to the “black other” instead of perceiving the involvement of blacks and whites alike. The Daltons’ choice of Bigger as a representative of the entire group of oppressed to be helped through a job can therefore be labelled as an attempt at escapism. Similarly, Mr. Dalton’s acquisition of ping-pong tables for kids in the ghetto is a joke compared to the larger principles he himself supports, such as the “code of ethics in business” (NS 357) by which the exaggerated prices for rundown flats in the Black Belt are fixed.

In their approach towards Bigger and the black minority he represents, the Daltons achieve the reverse of their intentions. Malcolm X claims that “America’s most dangerous and threatening black man is the one who has been kept sealed up by the Northerner in the black ghettoes - the Northern white power structure’s system to keep talking democracy while keeping the black man out of sight somewhere, around the corner”

(377-378). The perception of the black man as such, his “keeping-out-of- sight” to veil the roots of the dilemma that regulate his life, is a basic feature Wright uses in Native Son to disclose that “social and economic barriers against race lead to grave injustices toward racial minorities and that those injustices so distort character and personality growth that criminal monstrosities, such as Bigger, are produced” (Ford 28). Mrs.

Dalton symbolizes this circumstance more powerfully than any other character within the novel. Not only is she literally blind to the world around her, her perception of Bigger furthermore exposes the fact that “auf beiden Seiten verstellt ein übermächtiges, die Wahrnehmung

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 34 vorstrukturierendes Superzeichenschema den Blick auf die tatsächliche

Differenz des Anderen. Der narrative Text reflektiert die horizontverengende Wirkung dieses Superzeichendenkens mit Hilfe der

Blindheitsmetaphorik” (Schmidt 140). Mrs. Dalton’s first appearance in

Native Son is meaningful already, for Mr. Dalton presents her as having “a very deep interest in colored people” even though “she’s blind” (NS 78), that is she doesn’t see Bigger and his colour, but nevertheless acts as if she did.

In the unfolding of Native Son, Bigger is confronted with various other characters who do not truly see him. The press suspects that the plan to collect ransom money from the Daltons is too elaborate for his mind and so does the State Attorney Buckley, who insists that Communists are involved in the crime. However, they underestimate Bigger’s mental skills and fall back upon the stereotype of the dumb Negro who needs guidance in order to be able to make it in the white world. Peggy, the Daltons’ housekeeper, is so wrapped up in her work and emotionally bound to the

Daltons that for her there is no alternative to the chauffeur’s willingness to become a part of the “one big family” (NS 87). Finally, also Boris Max’s perception of his client’s true nature does not correspond to the way Bigger truly feels, for outside the courtroom and apart from his theoretical formulations, his “eyes [are] full of terror” and “his body move[s] nervously” (NS 453) when he faces his client.

Besides these characters, Mary Dalton’s attitude is worth closer analysis. Even though she assures Bigger that she is on his side and shows a deep interest in him, she as well is blinded in her perception of him. Her

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 35 prompting him to join a union during the job interview with Mr. Dalton is a first sign of her clumsiness in regard to Bigger, for she neither realises the situation he is in, nor does she notice the embarrassment she causes. The culmination of her naïve and biased benevolence is the enforced trip to the

Black Belt, where she wants to “see how your people live. …  We know so little about each other,” so that, as she explains, “I just want to see” (NS

101). What she does not perceive, however, is Bigger as an individual who is sitting right next to her as well as the growing uneasiness she causes in him.

Just like Native Son, also Invisible Man can be categorized as “an analysis of ‘perception’ which documents the effect prejudice, alienation, oppression and isolation have on one’s ability to ‘see and be seen’ clearly”

(James Nager qtd. in Kumasi 60). In fact, the metaphor of invisibility runs like a red thread throughout the novel right from its prologue, where the narrator introduces his imperceptible essence as the distinguishing feature of his personality. Being invisible requires vision or at least the idea of sight. Invisible Man sees other people and tries to meet them correspondingly. Yet, the responses he gets hint at the fact that others do not perceive him as an individual, but rather project their own image on him. The narrator’s imperceptible state is subsequently related to the surroundings in which he lives: “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 construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality” and through which they see, “indeed, everything and anything except me” (IM 3). This concept of

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 36 reciprocal (mis-) perception alludes to the notion of “Daltonism” in Native

Son and, consequently, the people who refuse to see Invisible Man can be referred to as “Daltons” as well.

Contrary to Bigger Thomas and his actions that end his state of invisibility, Invisible Man’s recollections depict his growing awareness of the distorted perception of himself and the world around him. “Whereas

Wright’s chief curse was the evil of racism, Ellison’s pet peeve is ignorance, particularly when it is self-imposed and self-perpetuated”

(Ostendorf 108). In fact, Invisible Man’s memories are soaked with people whom he has encountered who do not “see anything at all when they look in his direction, for they know that something is there. What they do is look trough that something at what they expect to see, what they think is there

— the inner eye sees a fiction that it has itself created” (Vogler 64).

However, the novel reveals that its protagonist also misperceives himself, as he asserts at its end that “I carried my sickness and though for a long time I tried to place it in the outside world, the attempt to write it down shows me that at least half of it lay within me” (IM 575). Consequently, the opening scene of the Battle Royal is not the only occasion in which the protagonist is “blindfolded with broad bands of white cloth” (IM 21). In fact, Invisible Man’s dogma that “humility was the secret, indeed, the very essence of progress” (IM 17) is uncovered as his personal adaptation of invisibility to himself. By acting the way the white majority expects him to,

Invisible Man denies himself and becomes a type rather than an individual.

Similarly, his period of education at college is nothing more than the preparation for the future attitude of submissiveness he is expected to play.

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 37

This is illustrated by his memory of “the bronze statue of the college

Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding” (IM 36).

Following his expulsion from college, the narrator moves North to

Harlem, where the first striking feature he notices is the co-existence of blacks and whites without any visible barriers, for example when he uses the ubway for the first time. Blindness and invisibility become the universal cornerstones of human existence in the anonymity of the city, where “it is sometimes advantageous to be unseen” (IM 3). However, as the so-called letters of recommendation he carries imply, the narrator remains unconsciously haunted by

those others, those who had set me here in this Eden, whom we

knew though we didn’t know, who were unfamiliar in their

familiarity, who trailed their words to us through blood and

violence and ridicule and condescension with drawling smiles, and

who exhorted and threatened, intimidated with innocent words as

they described to us the limitations of our lives and the vast

boldness of our aspirations, the staggering folly of our impatience

to rise even higher; who, as they talked, aroused furtive visions

within me of blood-froth sparkling their chins like their familiar

tobacco juice, and upon their lips the curdled milk of a million

black slave mammies’ withered dugs, a treacherous and fluid

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 38

knowledge of our being, imbibed at our source and now

regurgitated foul upon us. (IM 112)

Since it takes him a long time to realise that he has “been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility” (IM 579-580), in Invisible

Man, the protagonist himself is the prototypical “Dalton,” for he refuses to acknowledge the limitations that result from his conformist conduct.

Invisible Man is a story told in retrospect. This allows the matured narrator to introduce ironic comments on his own past blindness. Given the disclosure of the resolution at the beginning of the narrative, readers gain further insight into the protagonist’s predicament which he himself has not yet achieved. These observations are accompanied and emphasised by metaphors of blindness. Among them, the sermon of Homer A. Barbee stands out. “For a few minutes old Barbee had made Invisible Man see the vision” (IM 133), that is a prophecy which boosts endurance and subservience. The formation supplied at college is no more than a continuation of this attitude of conformity. Dr. Bledsoe best embodies this principle, for he literally had to close his eyes in the confrontation with the white world in order to attain his current position, “yes, [he] had to act the

Nigger” (IM 143). At this point, the narrator is still stuck with the vision of this dream so that the fact that the preacher is blind does not touch him.

Nor does Barbee’s stumbling and falling upon Bledsoe’s legs, from where two white men help him up. This fragility of the preacher and the support he needs to get up on his own feet again do, in fact, reveal the assumption of white superiority on which his entire sermon and therefore the protagonist’s world-view are based.

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 39

1.2. Black Microcosms: “A Nation Within the Nation”

As shown in the previous chapters,the white world is truly the right world and constructed as the ideal that blacks are constantly confronted with. The reality in which Invisible Man and Bigger Thomas move is of a different nature. In large parts, Native Son and Invisible Man unfold within a black world that, even though it is embedded in a white macrocosm and thus reflects its structures, is shut off from the rest of the world and, at best, exploited or gazed at by the white majority. Within these black microcosms, its members experience a mixture of limitations and freedom.

Their lives are generally restricted to unfolding within its limits, and the keys that would grant them access to the larger world are firmly held by white rulers. On the other hand, the black world offers them the opportunity to express themselves and their subculture as well as to temporarily forget the suppressions they experience. “The ghetto is,” in other words, “ambiguously both trap and womb, offering imprisonment and superficial security” (Bluefarb 141). In his introduction to Black

Metropolis, Richard Wright asserts that out of it “can come ideas quickening life or hastening death, giving us peace or carrying us toward another war” (xx). Similarly, Ralph Ellison defines the microcosm of

Harlem as “the scene of the folk-Negro’s death agony,” but also as “the setting of his transcendence” (“Harlem is Nowhere” 296). In the following chapters, black nations within the white American Nation will be analysed.

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 40

1.2.1. The Southern World in Invisible Man

The first chapters in Invisible Man, that is those covering the protagonist’s recollections of his time at college, unfold in the South.

Presumably Invisible Man spent a pleasurable and carefree time there up to the incident with Mr. Norton and his subsequent expulsion from college.

This is shown by the fact that he compares his life at college to “Eden” (IM

112) and, furthermore, he describes it in terms that do not lack lyrical beauty:

The buildings were old and covered with vines and the roads

gracefully winding, lined with hedges and wild roses that dazzled

the eyes in the summer sun. Honeysuckle and purple wisteria hung

heavy from the trees and white magnolia mixed with their scents in

the bee-humming air. I’ve recalled it often, here in my hole. How

the grass turned green in the springtime and how the mocking birds

fluttered their tails and sang, how the moon shone down on the

buildings, how the bell in the chapel rang out the precious short-

lived hours; how the girls in bright summer dresses promenaded

the grassy lawn. (IM 34)

However, this paradisiacal image that is conveyed begins to falter straight away in that it sharply contrasts with the narrator’s current residence in a Harlem basement, a “hole,” as he describes it, from where he resumes his past. “It’s so long ago and far away that here in my invisibility

I wonder if it happened at all,” he ponders, “for how could it have been real

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 41 if now I am invisible” (IM 36). Secondly, also more unfavourable impressions are recollected at the end of each idyllic picture the narrator draws: the insane asylum at the end of the road is mentioned just as the

Sunday ritual of exposure “to visitors and officials on the low, whitewashed reviewing stand” with “uniforms pressed, shoes shined, minds laced up, eyes blind like those of robots” (IM 36). The picture of unspoiled beauty we are presented with can consequently be considered a mirror of the protagonist’s conscience at that time, as he claims that “here within this quiet greenness I possessed the only identity I had ever known”

(IM 99). Additionally, the protagonist’s questioning of the reality of this precious time span of innocence as well as his completely detached and disillusioned standpoint add a further dream-like quality to these passages.

In summary, this “Eden” can be considered to be mere wishful thinking or blindness to reality.

His innocence and naivety cause Invisible Man great troubles when he drives Mr. Norton, whom he depicts as “forty years a bearer of the white man’s burden”4 (IM 37), out of the orderly world of the campus into the slave-quarters section. The encounter with Jim Trueblood and his tale of the incest with his daughter as well as the stop at the Golden Day reveal machinations that lie beyond the understanding of the young, inexperienced hero. On the one hand, “die Fahrt zu Trueblood wird für

Norton zu einer Fahrt in den ‘black belt’ des eigenen Bewußtseins” (Dietz

68), for it reminds him of his longing for his own, in the meantime

4 This is an allusion to “The White Man‘s Burden,” a notorious poem by Rudyard Kipling that presents racism as divine providence and elevates it to a noble cause of compassion to be carried out by white men.

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 42 deceased, daughter and fills him with emotions such as envy, admiration and guilt that, as he tells Trueblood, “you have looked upon chaos and are not destroyed” (IM 51). On the other hand, in the following scene at the brothel, where the insane from the asylum enjoy their day out, it is Norton himself who is considered to be “confusion come even into the Golden

Day” (IM 93). In this juxtaposition of chaos and order, the protagonist holds a dual role, for all he does is passively follow “the blazing white line that divided the highway,” and by this he actively fulfils Mr. Norton’s insistence on his “promise to tell me my fate” (IM 44).

Consequently, Invisible Man’s wish to be “back on the other side of the white line” (IM 49) is nothing but a chimera, since the white line that divides the world into black and white, wrong and right, or pure and impure, is exposed to be a mere artefact of white supremacy exactly through the incidents to which it leads. Furthermore, this division line can also be rated as a mirror of these opposing poles for, just as the white line divides the highway into two identical parts, Trueblood is a foil to Mr.

Norton in that he lived out longings which the latter did not dare to do. A further consideration this chain of episodes raises is linked to the question of perception and point of view for, as one of the insane at the Golden Day puts it, “the world moves in a circle like a roulette wheel. In the beginning, black is on top, in the middle epochs, white holds the odds, but soon

Ethiopia shall stretch forth her noble wings” (IM 81). Thus, whether one side or the other is the right one is relative; fact is that truth is like a coin - there are always two sides to it.

Another aspect worth considering in regard to the Southern world

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 43 in Invisible Man is the domain of education at college, epitomised by Dr.

Bledsoe and his career. Whereas Mr. Norton assures Invisible Man that

“self-reliance is a most worthy virtue” (IM 108), the president drains off his power from what Ralph Waldo Emerson regards as the opposite of this asset, that is conformity “to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions” (“Self-Reliance” 29). Not only does he unashamedly admit that he “had to act the nigger” (IM 143) in order to achieve his current status, but he also labels Invisible Man as such and instructs him “that the only way to please the white man is to tell him a lie” (IM 139). However, whereas Bledsoe considers himself “still the king down here” (IM 142) at college, his categorisation of Invisible Man as a “nobody, son. You don’t exist-can’t you see that” (IM 143) applies to himself as well. In fact, “one might call him a grotesque variation on the theme of the grandfather’s advice; for his goals are egotistical and his method of secret sabotage is distorted by corruption” (Gysin 219). In contrast to the grandfather, who pursued the liberation from white supremacy, its destruction and the gain of individuality as a result, Dr. Bledsoe undermines the white system in order to enrich himself in it and thus to become a part of it.

In summary, we can say that “Kapitel 1, das die Vorgänge im

Heimatraum, dem südstaatlichen Lebensbereich, eröffnet, ist zugleich

Kristallisationspunkt zentraler Motive und Themen. Wie sich am Anfang die weißen Kleinstadt-Honoratioren demaskieren, so wird am Ende deutlich, wie unbrüderlich die sich ‘Bruderschaft’ nennende

Parteiorganisation wirklich ist. Der Protagonist dringt von anfänglich unbewußter Auflehnung zum bewußten Widerstand vor” (Dietz 105). What

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 44 follows his forced departure from the South is the voyage north to Harlem, which is again, as one of the vets from the Golden Day states, “not a place, it’s a dream” (IM 152).

1.2.2. Black Metropolis

When Invisible Man reaches Harlem, he truly feels like the “large black mole” he observes on a woman in the subway “that arose out of the oily whiteness of her skin like a black mountain” (IM 158). Overwhelmed by a world in which black and white apparently mingle with ease, he realises that he “would have to take Harlem a little at a time” (IM 161).

Whereas he is rooted in the South, Bigger Thomas has supposedly been living in the Black Belt of Chicago for a longer time, as the information about the difficulties his mother experienced in search of accommodation earlier on suggests. Thus, while Bigger Thomas has been conditioned by the northern city for a longer period of time as he has been living on what

Richard Wright defines as “a new and terrifying plane of consciousness”

(“12 Million Black Voices” 108), in Invisible Man, as Ralph Ellison explains, “the movement north affects more than the Negro’s wage scale, it affects the protagonist’s entire psychosomatic structure” (“Richard

Wright’s Blues” 88).

Harlem is thus the catalyst of Invisible Man’s inevitable self- realization. It takes him a long time to grasp, however, that the experiences he accumulates there before his final retreat are shaped according to the dictum of the white world that precedes it. As “Ellison selects segments of

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 45 reality which virtually ask to be interpreted as border regions of human existence,” the events which unfold in Harlem, “itself a section of reality which threatens to distort and alienate everything and everybody within its range” (Gysin 187) are beyond the narrator’s control even though he is convinced that he holds his fate in his own hands. The encounter with Peter

Wheatstraw on the streets proves this, for he is first of all “like one of the vets from the Golden Day” (IM 174) to Invisible Man. Secondly, his promise to teach the protagonist some “good bad habits” (IM 176) in order to survive in the jungle of the city further emphasises the impression that the city is an enlarged madhouse ruled by principles that change according to the pragmatics of those who apply them.

Besides this analogy, other parallels can be drawn between subsequent incidents that occur in New York and the Battle Royal and college. In Emerson’s office, Invisible Man muses that “these folks are the

Kings of the Earth” (IM 181), a description Dr. Bledsoe used earlier on to depict himself. At Liberty Paints, Invisible Man is involved in a battle with

Lucius Brockway that resembles his fight with Tatlock in the prize ring.

Finally, the factory hospital echoes Bledsoe’s ideologies of formal conformity, the sojourn at the southern college and the history of the

Brotherhood burst like bubbles, as both turn out to be constructed illusions that sacrifice individuality to an imposed collective and objective truth. It takes Invisible Man a long time to understand that “coming to New York had perhaps been an unconscious attempt to keep the old freezing unit going, but it hadn’t worked; hot water had gotten into its coils” (IM 259).

This suggests that in the chaotic depiction of Harlem the internal turmoil of

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 46 the protagonist is mirrored and reinforced.

The city of Chicago, as it is presented in Native Son, is far away from a dream-like pot of unlimited possibilities to its population, especially the black segment therein. In fact, “Chicago’s physical aspects — noisy, crowded, filled with a sense of power and fulfilment — make Bigger continually aware of the advantages available to whites, while simultaneously underscoring the impossibility of achievement for blacks”

(Bloom 119). Bigger’s geographical segregation in the Black Belt opposes the shiny white world of the Daltons. Whereas the slum buildings are described as “dark and empty with yawning white windows” (NS 212), on his way to his employers Bigger enters a “quiet and spacious white neighborhood …. The houses he passed were huge: lights glowed softly in windows. The streets were empty, save for an occasional car that zoomed past on swift rubber tires” (NS 74). What is considered to be mere waffling of Bigger’s supposedly mad cell-mate, namely that blacks are forced to “live in such crowded conditions on the South Side that one out of every ten of us is insane” and that whites “dump all the stale food into the Black Belt and sell them for more than you can get anywhere else” (NS

373) is revealed to be true in this juxtaposition of the black and the white world. In fact, the sociological facts Wright included are drawn from real life and, as a result, “several journalists and sociologists cited Native Son in discussion of poor housing in Chicago and elsewhere” (Kinnamon,

“Introduction” 23).

Besides its realistic level in Native Son, Chicago furthermore assumes a symbolic dimension in that “Wright presents the city as an

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 47 objective correlative for Bigger’s psychological state” (Werner 127). This becomes apparent first of all through the constant feeling of restriction buildings and their inhabitants, but above all the “white other” that Bigger is constantly aware of to be right in his “solar plexus” (NS 51), impair upon him. In its depiction in Native Son, “the ‘promised land’ of the North” truly becomes “a wasteland, destroying black spirit and hope. Like trapped animals, black characters become ensnared in concrete jungles, and are finally exterminated as the hunters close in” (Gross Avery 78). It is mostly in the passages in which Bigger is hunted by the white arm of the law that the city assumes features of his own psyche. In full flight, the streets he is roaming become “long paths leading through a dense jungle” (NS 179) to him, “ghostly lamps” fight against a still “blacker darkness” (NS 212); in

“a tall, snow-covered building whose many windows gaped blackly,”

Bigger even recognizes “the eye-sockets of empty skulls” (NS 261).

Additionally, also natural forces are personified: Bigger is “feeling the wind screaming a protest against him” (NS 269) and “the room was filled with quiet and cold and death and blood and the deep moan of the night wind” (NS 268) after the attempted murder of Bessie Mears. Finally, the fact that the events revolving around Bigger are set in deep winter is also illuminating. Chicago is covered with snow, and not only does the whiteness of the environment heighten Bigger’s visibility, but it also alludes to the concepts of innocence and guilt. As “in the act of running away, Bigger learns that the white world, as symbolized by the snow- blanketed streets, is everywhere — that wherever he runs, he will be brought up short, confronted by the very world he is trying to flee”

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 48

(Bluefarb 149), we are left with two possible ways of interpretation: the innocence of the white world on the one hand and its accomplice in

Bigger’s crime on the other. In fact, Bigger attempts to cover himself up in snow when he is finally located by the police on a rooftop, which hints at the fact that his overt rebellion is rather the result of lasting victimization.

Metaphorically speaking, we may consider him to have drowned in the whiteness of the snow long before he committed his crimes.

A further aspect worth considering is the way characters behave within these black worlds, since in both Native Son an Invisible Man we are presented with personalities whose conduct we would consider to be abnormal according to our personal expectation of sociable behaviour.

However, since we follow the stories of “men reduced to the status of non- persons and removed from the protection of the social code,” they fail to meet our anticipations as they “can hardly be expected to honor the responsibilities imposed by that code” (Grier and Cobbs 110). Besides

Bigger and his crime, his commitment to his gang of friends and their

“achievements” are immediately striking, for not only do they actively break the law, but they also impose their own moral codes upon the world around them. This is shown by their double unit of measure applied to their robberies, for they have no bad conscience about stealing from their own people, but are hesitant to do the same to the white Mr. Blum. “In comparison, all of their other jobs had been play” (NS 44), Bigger reflects, for “crime for a Negro was only when he harmed whites, took white lives, or injured white property” (NS 361). Similarly, in Invisible Man we encounter the figures of Rinehart and Ras, but also the protagonist himself

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 49 in the later phase of his development when he employs the insight that “it is sometimes advantageous to be unseen” (IM 3). What they have in common with Bigger and his peers is that to them life is “dominated by the experience of extreme alienation; it does not distort the world, but the world appears to it already distorted, as a labyrinth, a no man’s land”

(Gysin 159). To find their way in this labyrinth of Black Metropolis, they employ what William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs define as “the black norm,” that is the establishment of personal laws designed to assure one’s survival in an environment that is perceived as a threat:

The result may be described as a cultural antisocialism, but it is

simply an accurate reading of one’s environment — a gift black

people have developed to a high degree, to keep alive. These and

related traits are simply adaptive devices developed in response to a

peculiar environment. They are no more pathological than the

compulsive manner in which a diver checks his equipment before a

dive or a pilot his parachute. They represent normal devices for

‘making it’ in America. (Grier and Cobbs 177-178)

While Bigger carries a gun when he goes to the Daltons, for “it would make him feel that he was the equal of them, give him a sense of completeness” (NS 73), Ras is armed with a spear in order to compensate for the feeling of security his environment does not supply. Similarly,

Rinehart is a master of disguise and adapts himself to the demands of single situations in order to get the most out of them for himself, a device

Invisible Man himself adopts in his plot against the Brotherhood.

Furthermore, the enlightenment of his hole contributes to his categorisation

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 50 among what can be considered to be law-breakers from a white-centred perspective, for he illegally drains off power to illuminate his cave.

1.2.3. Meeting the Thomases

Whereas we get little information about Invisible Man’s familial background apart from his grandfather, we know that Bigger lives with his mother, his brother Buddy and his sister Vera. Their surname is Thomas and, given the publication of a short story collection by Richard Wright entitled Uncle Tom’s Children, the black family depicted at the core of

Native Son can be seen as progeny of Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher

Stowe’s novel. In fact, not only do they inhabit a small one-room apartment that is reminiscent of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but they also face white supremacy in their everyday lives reaching far into their interpersonal relations.

Living in a room where “there was no rug on the floor and the plastering on the walls and ceiling hung loose in many places,” the

Thomases have to be content with living among “two iron beds, four chairs, an old dresser, and a drop leaf-table on where they ate” (NS 134-

135). This severely limited space in which they live causes distress in

Bigger, who wishes “that he could rise up through the ceiling and float away from this room forever” (NS 132). In contrast to Invisible Man’s at least superficially joyful period at college, “in Native Son there is no more room for the beauty of nature; the landscape is that of the ghetto: cold, unhealthy, dangerous,” and it becomes clear that “Bigger is supposed to

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 51 spend his whole life in a rat-infested apartment” (Gysin 107).

Given the squalor and poverty in which they grow up, Bigger, his siblings and, on a larger scale, the whole population of the ghetto have

“little chance to gain the derived status that is the cornerstone of self- esteem” (Wyne et al. 38). However, since their “evaluative framework is provided by the black community and not by the larger community in which his group is actually a subculture” (Baughman 44), the members of

Bigger’s family seem to have adapted themselves to this situation as the standard way of life. In fact, unpleasant facts are tacitly avoided in a

“conspiracy of shame” (NS 34) among them, such as the habit of looking away in the morning when the others dress.

To Bigger, however, his family is a constant reminder of his inferiority within society. Consequently, his relations towards them are influenced by this assumption and yet, at the same time, he is bound to them emotionally:

He shut their voices out of his mind. He hated his family because he

knew that they were suffering and he was powerless to help them.

He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fullness

how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives, he would be

swept out of himself with fear and despair. So he held toward them

an attitude of iron reserve; he lived with them, but behind a wall, a

curtain. And toward himself he was even more exacting. He knew

that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into

his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else. So

he denied himself and acted tough. (NS 40)

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 52

As a result, Bigger is an outsider even within his own family: whereas he causes his sister to faint by nauseating her with a dead rat, he does not shrink back from using physical violence towards his brother Buddy to extort his compliance. To his mother’s reproaches that he is the “most no- countest man I ever seen in all my life” (NS 39) he reacts with feigned indifference, while in reality he is keen on achieving something and especially on showing off in front of his brother and his peers. As a result of his unresponsive attitude, Bigger is rarely involved in the family’s conversations with more than one-syllabic answers even though he is at the core of their discussions, for the promise of his new job at the Daltons’ signifies huge economic relief for the whole family. Bigger is therefore objectified through his family’s conversation, and “die Objektivierung im

Mikrokosmos schwarze Familie versinnbildlicht Biggers Marginalisierung in der schwarzen Gruppe, die im wesentlichen ‘über’ und nicht ‘mit’ dem

Protagonisten kommuniziert” (Schmidt 72).

Among the Thomases, Mrs. Thomas maintains an outstanding position. Given the absence of her husband who “got killed in a riot … in the South” (NS 106), she is the head of the family. Burdened with duties, she attempts to place some of her responsibilities upon her eldest son, however, with little success, as she herself foretells Bigger that “some of these days you going to wish you had made something out of yourself, instead of just a tramp” (NS 39). Through Mrs. Thomas, Bigger is prompted to assume the role of the missing father in order to prove his maturity and manhood. However, there is little possibility for Bigger to make something of himself besides earning money through menial jobs in

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 53 the white world. As Mrs. Thomas urges her son to do exactly that, Bigger perceives his mother as standing on the other side of the white wall that encircles him. Contrary to his assessment, we can consider Mrs. Thomas “a concerned mediator between society and the child. … This hostility of society,” which Bigger experiences even among his relatives, is in fact

“communicated to him by his mother, whose primary concern is that he survive” (Grier and Cobbs 74).

2. Running Nigger Boys

In his autobiographical novel Black Boy, Richard Wright remembers that “I never left my house to walk two blocks without being made to feel a Negro” (qtd. in Kinnamon 1973, 17). Bigger Thomas undergoes the identical experience, and so does the protagonist in Invisible

Man, for both of them are subdued to white superiority and therefore severely restricted in their everyday lives. George Herbert Mead claims that “we cannot realize ourselves except in so far as we can recognize the other in his relationship to us” (94) so that, as a result, just like Richard

Wright, both Bigger and Invisible Man are constantly reminded of their

“Niggerness” by the white world. Furthermore, Mead asserts that “to have self-conscience one must have the attitude of the other in one’s own organism as controlling the thing that he is going to do. What appears in the immediate experience of one’s self in taking that attitude is what we term the ‘me.’ It is that self which is able to maintain itself in the community, that is recognized in the community in so far as it recognizes

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 54 the others” (196). However, if we bear in mind that blacks are set in between two distinct worlds, that is the white, the “right” world and the black subculture located therein, they also dispose of two distinct points of reference to turn to. E. Earl Baughman supports this point of view, as he claims that “the category ‘Negro’ is an American creation, carrying for black and white alike the connotative freight of the American experience of black slavery and its aftermath …. In the new semantics of race and ethnic membership, 'black' is a self-chosen category, ‘Negro’ is an imposed one” (xiii). In their search of what Mead labels the ‘me,’ Invisible Man and

Bigger Thomas can thus be regarded as being animated by a dichotomy of two distinct points of reference: their “deepest psychological impulses alternate between the magnetic poles of assimilationism and Negro nationalism” (Bone 1968, 4).

This oscillation between the black and the white world can be considered as the animating principle in the two novels, since it triggers off the protagonists’ process of self-reflection. On the one hand, it causes

Bigger’s and Invisible Man’s realisation of the white world “not as promised land but as an unreal waste land that destroys blacks in particular vicious ways” (Werner 122). On the other hand, it also leads to a reconsideration of the black place within the white space and the principles that regulate life and relationships therein. Movement is thus a basic metaphor for the protagonists’ development in Native Son and Invisible

Man. The second section in Bigger’s tale is appropriately called “Flight,” and in Ellison’s novel, various characters “Keep This Nigger-Boy

Running” (IM 33). Both Bigger Thomas and Invisible Man move from

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 55 darkness to light and from what they perceive as an imprisoning society to a supposedly free existence in its border districts of the underground and real prison. Invisible Man furthermore depicts the voyage from the South to the North, which, as Ralph Ellison explains, “is always the road to freedom

— the movement upward” (“The Art of Fiction” 173).

A distinction between active motion and the passive reaction to an outside stimulus is helpful in the investigation of this concept. Whereas in the first case the direction one follows is chosen by the individual, the second possibility offers a set of prefabricated paths to go for. For blacks as depicted in the novels, the second alternative applies, because “if one is maintained, however, by and within boundaries set by another, then one is not a setter of place, but a prisoner of another’s desire. Under such conditions what one calls, and, perhaps, feels is one’s place would be, from the perspective of human agency, placeless” (Baker 87).

2.1. Motion in a Static World

The opening scene in Native Son, in which Bigger kills a rat that plagues his family in their small apartment, bears a symbolical level that foreshadows the main theme of the novel as well as the doom of its protagonist, as “the final ‘rat,’ of course, is Bigger himself” (Kinnamon

1973, 127). First of all, the animal embodies Bigger’s own condition: just like it, he lives in a world in which there is no place for him, be it to move around freely, to unfold his personality according to his wishes or to enjoy the benefits of social mobility. Furthermore, Bigger assumes animal-like

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 56 features not only through his depiction as a sub-human being in the aftermath of his murders, but also in the hunt for him, when he is literally driven into a corner to be caught and exterminated. His comparison to “a strange plant blooming in the day and wilting at night” is also revealing, for even though Bigger supposes that “it was his own sun and darkness, a private and personal sun and darkness” (NS 59) that regulate its rhythms, the plant is nevertheless limited to growing on a restricted ground and has no choice but to make the best of its stasis. In another episode, Bigger’s inability to break out of the Black Belt of Chicago is powerfully visualised through the metaphor of being able to fly, an ability denied him exactly because of his background. His and Gus’ “eyes were riveted; a slate- colored pigeon swooped down to the middle of the steel car tracks and began strutting to and fro with ruffled feathers, its fat neck bobbing with regal pride.” Trapped in the ghetto, Bigger “tilted his head and watched the slate-colored bird flap and wheel out of sight over the edge of a high roof”

(NS 50-51). Whereas the bird just flies away, the roofs of the houses indicate the limitedness of Bigger’s horizon and literally become the end of his own nose. This state of passive endurance is in sharp contrast to his restless character, for “every slight move in the street evoked a casual curiosity in him” (NS 45) and “from the moment Bigger awakens, he is in constant motion but it is a movement without purpose” (Gross Avery 83).

Given the impossibility of achievement he faces in his world,

Bigger can be compared to a bird whose wings have been clipped.

Similarly, Invisible Man compares himself to a Robin that has been picked clean. The answer to his question “who was Robin and for what had he

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 57 been hurt and humiliated” (IM 194), is therefore the answer to his own condition, that is the identity he is looking for on his journey. Another sequence within Invisible Man is, however, even more illuminating:

But once a man gits hisself in a tight spot like that there ain’t much

he can do. It ain’t up to him no longer. There I was, tryin’ to git

away with all my might, yet having to move without movin’. I flew

in but I had to walk out. I had to move without movin’. I done

thought ‘bout it since a heap, and when you think right hard you see

that that’s the way things is always been with me. That’s just about

been my life. (IM 59-60)

In these words, Jim Trueblood summarises the incest with his daughter (cf.

1.2.1). On a deeper level, however, his statement reveals the universal condition the protagonist and his kinfolk experience as native American sons and daughters, for they have to move, that is they have to face the world around them and live their existences accordingly, without there being any place to go. Consequently, achievement is reduced to the fulfilment of expectations imposed from the outside, that is to the level of surfaces, for, as Bigger exemplifies, “the way out is constantly blocked: to be a flyer one must be white. To do anything outside the role his society has assigned to him, he has to be white" (Bluefarb 141).

Even though Invisible Man assumes that he is in complete control of his life, he unknowingly experiences the same situation as Bigger. Not only is he always told what to do and how to do it, but also the parallelisms between the various episodes and figures of authority in the novel prove that he is actually standing still. At the Chtonian he feels like he “had been

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 58 through it all before” (IM 300); through the Brotherhood dogma, his personal responsibility is perverted into an (in-) equality that mirrors the

Battle Royal (cf. IM 30-31, 463); as “the great white father” (IM 473),

Brother Jack is the colourless counterpart of the “coal-black daddy” Dr.

Bledsoe (IM 116). In this imposed condition of stasis, “for the Negro there is relative safety as long as the impulse toward individuality is suppressed.

As soon, however, as this forbidden impulse seeks expression, intolerable anxiety is aroused. Threatened by his own unfolding personality as much as by the whites, the Negro learns to camouflage, to dissimulate, to retreat behind a protective mask” (Bone, “Ralph Ellison” 25). Ralph Ellison alleges that “the phrase ‘I’m nowhere expresses the feeling borne in upon many Negroes that they have no stable, recognized place in society. One’s identity drifts in a capricious reality in which even the most commonly held assumptions are questionable. One ‘is’ literally, but one is nowhere; one wanders dazed in a ghetto maze, a ‘displaced person’ of American democracy” (“Harlem is Nowhere” 300). In the following chapters, the various directions of action the characters in the novels have at their disposal will be analysed in greater detail.

2.1.1. Conformity: “I’m Nowhere”

George Herbert Mead claims that “the essential basis and prerequisite of the fullest development of that individual’s self” takes place

“only in so far as he takes the attitudes of the organized social group to which he belongs toward the organized, co-operative social activity or set

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 59 of activities in which that group as such is involved” (155). The adoption of the norms that society imposes can be equalled to conformity, and for the black characters within the novels more often than not this means a constant shift between the black and the white world. In fact, with the exception of Bigger Thomas, they swing between these two worlds, at best in accordance with Booker T. Washington’s prediction that “no race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field than there is in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities”

(Washington 36). As a result, they are literally nowhere.

The female characters in Native Son are a prototypical example of the fulfilment of Booker T. Washington’s dictum. Bigger’s sister Vera is described as “a sappy girl; she did not have any more sense than to believe everything she was told” (NS 45). Bigger’s relation to his mother is also overshadowed by her acceptance of the given squalid circumstances in which they are forced to live. He loathes “the old voice of his mother telling of suffering, of hope, of love beyond this world … because it made him feel as condemned and guilty as the voice of those who hated him” (NS 313).

Whereas we can consider them to be “content to nag and nurture”

(Harris 65), Bigger’s girlfriend holds a dual position within this classification for, as Bigger experiences, “there were two Bessies: one a body that he had just had and wanted badly again; the other was in Bessie’s face; it asked questions; it bargained and sold the other Bessie to advantage” (NS 170). This is shown by the fact that, even though she is

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 60 aware that she depends upon the white world and truly “lives their lives when she was working in their homes, not her own” (NS 169), she attempts to get the best out of it in that she is said to have stolen from her employers as well. Furthermore, Bigger is able to silence her and her conscience, at least temporarily: by showing her the money he has stolen from Mary and the promise of even more of it, he is able to “blot out, kill, sweep away the

Bessie on Bessie’s face and leave the other helpless and yielding before him” (NS 170), for she neglects her moral scruples in the face of the awaiting material comfort. In summary, the women in Native Son reveal and reinforce what, in his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James

Baldwin calls “the peculiar triumph of society — and its loss,” namely the fact that society “is able to convince those people to whom it has given inferior status of the reality of this decree; it has the force and the weapons to translate its dictum into fact, so that the allegedly inferior are actually made so, insofar as the societal realities are concerned” (19). The concept of a “depressive strategy” (Wyne et al. 29) applies to Mrs. Thomas, Vera and Bessie, for all they seem to be concerned with is satisfying their primary needs and they capitulate to the impossibility of achieving higher goals.

In Invisible Man, the protagonist follows a similar scheme, yet he is unaware of his entanglement in it and consequently believes that he is a free agent choosing where to go. In fact, he mistakenly assumes his grandfather’s advice “to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction” as a suggestion towards conformity and consequently becomes the prototypical “Sambo doll” up to

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 61 the realisation of the true meaning of what it means to “ let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open” (IM 16). Consequently, his deeds are orientated towards the delight of the white world and the execution of its expectations: “tempted by the promise of material and intellectual comfort, the protagonist affiliates himself with the group, even though, for him, individuals (himself in particular) do count” (Smith 37). Ultimately, however, he learns from his failures, and the true meaning of the lyrics in

Louis Armstrong’s song become clear to him as a hyperbole for his own striving for individuality through conformity:

Out in the street, shuffling’ feet,

Couples passing two by two,

While here I am, left high and dry,

Black, and ’cause I’m black I’m blue.

…

I’m white inside, it don’t help my case,

Cause I can’t hide what is on my face. (Razaf 116)

This being “white inside” accompanies him for a long time, as

Invisible Man resumes, “I had kept unswervingly to the path placed before me, had tried to be exactly what I was expected to be, had done exactly what I was expected to do …. I knew of no other way of living, nor other forms of success available to such as me” (IM 147). Consequently, he submits his own needs to the demands of the mass. In various events leading up to his self-chosen hibernation, the protagonist joins “those who look at the world out of the eyes of convention only” in order to “impose a connection upon otherwise disconnected events, avoiding an understanding

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 62 of the real world and maintaining the illusion of a coherent and just world that serves their interest” (Bryant 312). For a long period of time, Dr.

Bledsoe, Mr. Norton and the businessmen Invisible Man expects to provide himself with a job remain his big idols to strive after:

When I met the big men to whom my letters were addressed I

would put on my best manner. I would speak softly, in my most

polished tones, smile agreeably and be most polite; and I would

remember that if he (‘he’ meant any of the important gentlemen)

should begin a topic of conversation (I would never begin a subject

of my own) which I found unfamiliar, I would smile and agree. (IM

157)

In his intentions that he “would be charming” (IM 164), the protagonist becomes what Malcolm X defines as the “twentieth-century Uncle

Thomas,” that is “a professional Negro,” for truly Invisible Man’s

“profession is being a Negro for the white man” (X 345). This adherence to a white-centred existence as a “Negro” implies, however, a denial of his black roots at least on the superficial level of his supposedly visible behaviour and tastes. Living in Harlem he encounters these roots more often than he wishes and his reactions on these occasions prove his conformist traits. At a restaurant he refuses the traditional southern breakfast pork chop he is offered in order to have coffee, orange juice and toast instead. Not only does he deny himself in this act, but the protagonist also believes that his forced devotion to the northern way of life is “a sign of the change that was coming over me and which would return me to college a more experienced man” (IM 178). What he really does, however,

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 63 resembles “the miracle of whitening black skin” he sees advertised in the window of a beauty parlour, for his aim is truly to “win greater happiness with whiter complexion” and thereby become “outstanding in his social set” (IM 262).

2.1.2. Escapism: “Going Nowhere”

In the face of “overpowering social systems that stifle the development of individuality” (Fabre 58), individuals as those portrayed in

Wright’s and Ellison’s novels have little or no space at their disposal to move, for “the organization and unification of a social group is identical with the organization and unification of any of the selves arising within the social process in which that group is engaged, or which it is carrying on”

(Mead 144). We can conclude that the inferior status imposed upon blacks by the white majority becomes internalised through their conformity and consequently they live with the awareness that “even though we might be with them, we weren’t considered to be of them” (X 107). Max’s plea at court summarises the predicament in which not only his client Bigger, but also his kinfolk as a whole are trapped: “Taken collectively, they are not simply twelve million people; in reality they constitute a separate nation, stunted, stripped and held captive within this nation, devoid of social, political and economic rights” (NS 423). Even in the supposedly free northern metropolis of New York, Invisible Man notices this concept of captivity as well, for when he walks on Wall Street, he perceives it as “full of hurrying people who walked as if they had been wound up and were

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 64 directed by some unseen control” and who remind him “fleetingly of prisoners carrying their leg irons as they escaped from a chain gang” (IM

164). The image of the leg iron visualises the situation the characters in

Native Son and Invisible Man confront. Even though they conform to the hostile circumstances and just like the people on the street they seem

“aware of some self-importance” (IM 164), their existence is enmeshed in

“the contradiction between the emphasis in American culture on the importance and necessity of power in the individual and the actual powerlessness of the black American” (Wyne et al. 48).

In this enclosure between the propagated ideal pole of individual freedom and the real condition of black stasis, a tactic open to Afro-

Americans is to simply overlook this dichotomy and to pretend that everything is in its right place. As consequently no movement at all occurs, this escapism is employed as a strategy in order to avoid life truly turning into what Bigger experiences as “flesh nailed to the world, a longing spirit imprisoned in the days of the earth” (NS 314). This consolation through pretence takes place in the individual mind, which consequently becomes the vehicle of travelling around without restrictions. Religion is a prime example for this; Keneth Kinnamon explains that in Native Son, “the function of Christianity … is to serve as an opiate of the black masses”

(1973, 138). This principle is embodied in Mrs. Thomas, who constantly sings spirituals while she is carrying out her duties. Their lyrics alone are informative when observed from the position in which she dwells:

Life is like a mountain railroad

With an engineer that’s brave

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 65

We must make the run successful

From the cradle to the grave… (NS 40)

Whereas the direction the railroad follows is scheduled in advance, Mrs.

Thomas’ agency is restricted to the acceptance of the route. Nevertheless, the responsibility of achieving the goal resides within herself. We can therefore claim that she achieves a measure of freedom through the adoption of a fatalistic world-view in which she considers larger events to be simply beyond her personal control. On the contrary, we can say that for both Bigger and Invisible Man “religion is for the heart, not for the head”

(IM 278).

Apart form the eviction scene where an old woman equals the Bible with “the last straw” (IM 270) that comforts her, in Ellison’s novel religion is depicted even more critically than in Native Son. This is shown by the blind preacher Homer A. Barbee and by the way his service degenerates into a mere theatrical (self-)adulation of Dr. Bledsoe. Not only is the latter referred to as the incarnation of the “Founder,” that is “his living agent, his physical presence” (IM 132), but also Bledsoe becomes the judge over life and death in his management of college, for he excludes the protagonist from this paradise which he perceives as “Eden” (IM 112, cf. 1.3.1.).

Furthermore, he claims to be able to have “every Negro in the country hanging on tree limbs” (IM 143).

The Rinehart episode also tackles the topic of faith. As Rinehart is basically an illusion, a shape without substance that the protagonist embodies temporarily, the advertised abilities of the true Reverend at the

“Holy Way Station” that “I See all, Know all, Tell all, Cure all” (IM 495)

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 66 can rather be described as the ability to distinguish between appearance and essence and to act accordingly. This shows that, besides being the provider of a comfort that lies beyond the earth, in Invisible Man faith furthermore becomes an opiate that can be used to lull people into passivity and transform them into easy victims of manipulation.

Another opiate that is available to accelerate the oblivion of harsh realities is the use of alcohol and drugs. Invisible Man smokes marihuana in his cave when he begins his recollections; its consumption triggers off “a strangely satisfying experience for an invisible man” (IM 13). This remains his only drug consumption in the story, however, the protagonist encounters various minor characters that are prone to drink more than they endure in order to forget. In Native Son, Bigger’s girlfriend Bessie drinks alcohol on various occasions. Bigger knows of her longing for inebriation as an opportunity to escape; “she wanted liquor and he wanted her. So he would give her the liquor and she would give him herself” (NS 169).

Furthermore, he comprehends the correlation that “what his mother had was Bessie’s whiskey, and Bessie’s whiskey was his mother’s religion”

(NS 271). Trudier Harris summarises this insight when she proclaims that

“religion, alcohol and sex, as they relate to the black women in Native Son, are all reactive activities, indicative of the margin of safety and response to the status quo that are characteristic of their personality. These crutches allow none of the women the creative urges associated with a desire to fly planes or to escape from the ghetto” (77).

Sexuality functions as a further means of escape. In fact, the vet expelled from the campus explains that “a woman is any man’s most easily

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 67 accessible symbol of freedom” (IM 153). Invisible Man possesses white women during his sojourn over ground in New York, only to realise, however, that to them he is no more than such a symbol as well. Emma is

“intrigued and intriguing” (IM 302), but thinks that Invisible man “should be a little blacker” (IM 303); to Sybil, he is “like warm ebony against pure snow” (IM 520) when she finally possesses him. Similarly, Bigger Thomas is attracted to Mary Dalton; “his senses drunk with the odor of her hair and skin” (NS 114), Bigger feels “enveloped in a sense of physical elation” (NS

115). In her presence, he develops a “guarded feeling of freedom” which is

“tangled with the hard fact that she was white and rich, a part of the world of people who told him what he could and could not do” (NS 96-97). Since sexual relations with white women are the chief taboo for black men, it is in his intimacy with Bessie that Bigger is able to mend the gap between the illusion of freedom and the reality of bondage:

The thought and image of the whole blind world which had made

him ashamed and afraid fell away as he felt her as a fallow field

beneath him stretching out under a cloudy sky waiting for rain, and

he floated on a wild tide, rising and sinking with the ebb and flow

of her blood, being willingly drawn into a warm night sea to rise

renewed to the surface to face a world he hated and wanted to blot

out of existence. (NS 165)

His desire to dispose of this “field,” that is to have power over her, goes as far as his rape of Bessie before her murder, a violation of her integrity as a person that mirrors and yet distorts Sybil’s comparatively innocuous longing to be “raped” by Invisible Man.

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 68

Finally, the imitation of the white world embeds the opportunity to blast the boundaries it imposes upon the black minority. Even though this resembles the way of conformity, it goes beyond the limits of mere striving towards assimilation. Bigger and his peer Gus incorporate this tactic when they “play white” (NS 47), that is when they rehearse scenes they have internalised that depict the daily life of white people. Resembling a mere game on the surface, their child-like pastime is “an innocuous statement outwardly conforming to conventional expectation” which, however,

“carries within it a critical or satiric judgement offered from the perspective of the ostensibly powerless social subordinate” (Reilly 1990, 41). Even though they do not know what they are talking about, their amusement is

an example of creative politics that draws upon a store of

knowledge about the ways of white folks to achieve ends that

custom and prevalent racial assumptions deem improper. Those

ends may be material, but inevitably, they also have a great deal to

do with the integrity of the signifying speaker, who by the

subversive tactic of manipulating stereotypes achieves a clandestine

subjectivity, the right to be a free human agent. (Reilly 1990, 42-

43)

Still, only temporary freedom is achieved, for the construction of a parallel white universe which can be controlled and manipulated through exaggeration and humour is revealed as a construct exactly because it takes place within the realms of fantasy and collapses as soon as foreign notions from the real world are involved.

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 69

2.1.3. Supremacist Tendencies: “You are Nowhere”

Besides the tenets of conformity and escapism, a third way of motion is open to blacks which, whereas the first two go hand in hand, shifts into the opposite direction. In fact, it involves the rejection of these beliefs as well as an attitude of aggression towards those people who follow them. The basic dilemma, however, is the same in all three cases: the urge to move on a “whitened” ground. The resulting contradictory shifts within the black community can be associated with Booker T.

Washington’s metaphor of it as “a basket of crabs, wherein one should attempt to climb out, the others immediately pull him back” (qtd. in

Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues” 91). Upward motion in the basket of the

Black Belt can thus be achieved by pulling the others back, that is by appointing superiority on the self by humiliating others. E. Earl Baughman speaks of “displacement” when “instead of attacking the true object of his anger,” that is the white supremacist, a black person finds “a substitute object to act out against; usually this is another black who poses less of a threat in terms of counter aggression” (58).

In comparison to Bigger Thomas, the protagonist in Invisible Man is relatively tame in his relations towards his people. In fact, he is driven by the assumption that “to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are” and that “to lose your direction is to lose your face” (IM 577). Not only does he regard his position atop of his race as a big leader as inborn, but he is also far away from compelling his

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 70 visions upon others by violent means. Evelyn Gross Avery distinguishes between rebels and victims who “begin as outsiders with similar needs for recognition and self esteem,” but, just like Bigger and Invisible Man,

“develop quite differently. The rebels fulfil themselves through violence, the victims trough suffering and sacrificing for others” (29). Whereas

Bigger recurrently resorts to violence, Invisible Man’s only attempt to win over other blacks fails when he tries to bribe Tatlock, his comrade-in-arms in the fight for the benevolence of the white audience at the Battle Royal, to feign his own knock-out. Consequently, the supremacist traits the protagonist shows are very limited and rather self-reflective, that is focused on his own superiority rather than on others’ alleged inferiority (cf. Balibar,

“Rassismus und Nationalismus” 50-51).

The reverse applies to Bigger Thomas, for he incorporates what he perceives to be his people’s weaknesses into his stratagem to elevate himself upon a higher plane. Rarely has he any feelings of solidarity towards them as, “even though black like them, he felt there was too much difference between him and them to allow for a common binding and a common life” (NS 144). Since he is at best their equal, he has to pretend to be better in order to establish their inferiority in relation to himself. This is shown in the hierarchy within his gang, where he displaces his own impotency upon Gus in order to appear as the leader of the lot. To achieve this goal, he furthermore chooses “a mode of living that involves making oneself as attractive and interesting as possible to other people in order to control them in a manipulative fashion,” a strategy that we can define as

“expressive life style” (Wyne et al. 28-29). This scheme is intensified after

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 71 the murder of Mary Dalton, when “he wanted to test and taste each thing now to see how it went” and feels “like a man risen up well from a long illness” by surprising his mates with cigarettes as a gift and by displaying the “thick roll of bills” (NS 141) he has stolen from his victim.

In his urge for power, he even admires the likes of Mussolini and

Hitler: “he had liked to hear tell of men who could rule others, for in actions such as these he felt that there was a way to escape from this tight morass of fear and shame that sapped at the base of his life” (NS 145). Just as his ritualistic exhibition of power through material goods reflects their striving for superiority through flags, badges and similar emblems, he does not recoil from the use of a “violent strategy.” It is employed “if the person cannot use verbal or charismatic attributes to gain his objective” (Wyne et al. 29-30). Besides Mary Dalton, his siblings and Gus, it is again Bessie who becomes the main victim of Bigger’s aggressions. These can be equated to “nothing more than a desperate means of winning, through spontaneous acts of violence, the initial freedom denied him by the environment“ (Bloom 120). In relation to Bessie, the psychic force he employs has to be highlighted as it forms the basis of and is even more heartless than the physical cruelties he unleashes upon her. Knowing that

“she was afraid and he could handle her through her fear” (NS 176), Bigger abuses Bessie’s state of anxiety first of all to get the admiration he longs for from her, but subsequently more as an outlet for his own angst. In fact, he ponders that by including her in his plot against the Daltons “she would be bound to him by ties deeper than marriage. She would be his; her fear of capture and death would bind her to him with all the strength of her life”

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 72

(NS 180). Even when Mary Dalton’s corpse is discovered and all further plots of escape seem futile, Bigger notices that Bessie “was wanting the word that would free her of this nightmare; but he would not give it to her”

(NS 255) and thus literally blinds her to reality in order to have her with him. His plans to get rid of Bessie by murdering her can be seen as a foreshadowing of his own doom if we assume that “however much he may love his partner, he cannot help seeing, reflected in her, the narrowed range of his own world. She is his black counterpart and depreciated as much as he” (Grier and Cobbs 87). However, even though “die Marginalisierung von Frauen und die Gewalt gegen Frauen in Native Son fungieren in ihrer

Umsetzung als erfolgreiche Spiegelung der Marginalisierung des und der

Gewalt gegen den schwarzen Protagonisten” (Schmidt 147), besides

Mary’s fate, the cold-blooded rape and murder of Bessie undoubtedly support the thesis that this native son is “one of the most disagreeable characters in fiction” (Margolies 1969, 105).

A last point that reveals Bigger’s alleged superiority in relation to his kin is his name. Dan McCall maintains that “the name ‘Bigger Thomas’ carries us back to the name in that other famous novel which had achieved such immediate and large sales almost a century before. Bigger Thomas is

‘bigger’ than Uncle Tom, but he is part of the family, a son, just as Tom was an uncle” (189). Keneth Kinnamon focuses on the conflict between the white and the black world as forces that determine the designation. He asserts that the name “Bigger,” “ suggesting ‘nigger’ or ‘big nigger’, indicates the origin of his fear, which is created by racial oppression from a white world so vast and powerful that he is helpless before it. His

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 73 consciousness of his fear creates a sense of shame at his own inadequacy, equated by whites with his racial status. The combination of this fear and shame produces hatred, both self-hatred and hatred for the inequities of his life and the whites responsible for those inequities and his consequent humiliation” (1973, 130).

In my opinion, Bigger’s name is related to his constant search for something “bigger” to give him that special thrill and stimulus he lacks in his oppressed existence. These attempts to break out of the segregated environment he inhabits go from the possession of material goods to large plots that aim at radical changes of his condition. At the Daltons’, he feels that “a dollar watch was not good enough for a job like this; he would buy a gold one” (NS 90). He becomes aware that he plays a small part in a bigger drama in which “something awful’s going to happen to me” (NS

50), and, consequently, he wants a bigger share in it. Bigger is never content with the way things work out “for he had acted too hastily and accidentally” and, as a result, intends a bigger repetition of his deeds in which “he would plan and arrange so that he would have money enough to keep him a long time” (NS 159). Finally, also in his relations towards other people he truly feels to be “Bigger.” In fact, he considers them to be blind due to their manner of coming to terms with their alleged inferiority, whereas “he was not satisfied with the way things stood now; he was a man who had come in sight of a goal, then had won it, and in winning it had seen just within his grasp another goal, higher, greater” (NS 160).

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 74

2.2. “Machines Inside the Machine”

Even though Bigger assumes that he is free to strive for his individuality just like Invisible Man believes that he holds his fate in his hands, the circumstances in which they live reveal that their assumptions are mere illusions. In reality, their existences are “part of a much larger pattern which includes Negroes and Whites” (Samuel Sillen qtd. in Kumasi

8) and which determines them in their actions. This condition goes back first of all to the enslavement of their ancestors, for, as Ralph Ellison asserts, “the history of the American Negro is a most intimate part of

American history. Through the very process of slavery came the building of the United Sates” (“The Art of Fiction” 39). Due to this forced inducement into a foreign culture, Afro-Americans were required endurance as well as the ability to assimilate themselves to the new way of life, a process furthermore impeded by radical attempts to keep them “in their place,” that is at the bottom of society, after the abolition of slavery in

1863. In its aftermath, blacks were confronted with a variety of factions working for or against them: the migration to the urban world in the north that is thoroughly distinct from the rural South not only in its promise of freedom; the Ku Klux Klan with its fundamentalist views and the

Communist Party on its opposite left side on the political level; in the domain of arts and in general public discourse the stereotypical depiction of blacks versus attempts to portray them in a sympathetic way; in wartime their role as indispensable workforce and soldiers against the refusal to hire

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 75 them when enough white workers are present. This list of examples shows that blacks are trapped in a world of dualities and contradictions that revolve around them. Furthermore, this enumeration enforces Richard

Wright’s perception of the black universe:

It seems as though we are now living inside a machine; days and

events move on with a hard reasoning of their own. We live amid

swarms of people, yet there is a vast distance between people, a

distance that words cannot bridge. No longer do our lives depend

upon the soil, the sun, the rain, or the wind; we live by the grace of

jobs and the brutal logic of jobs. We do not know this world, or

what makes it move. In the South life was different; men spoke to

you, cursed you, yelled at you, or killed you. The world moved by

signs we knew. But here in the North cold forces hit you and push

you. It is a world of things… (“12 Million Black Voices” 109)

This concept of the world as a machine is an allegory that is also used in

Native Son and in Invisible Man to depict the plights the protagonists face in their struggle for individuality.

Bigger Thomas and Invisible Man live within “homogenous, closed systems” in which they are attributed their position due to their black skin.

These organizations as well as they as a part of it “are incapable of moral and artistic renewal since creative changes issue rarely from the centre of consensus, from the structurally hard core of a majority or from within rigid power structures. Closed structures and systems are interested in maintaining the norm, the habit, the done thing, the boundary” (Ostendorf

100). In Native Son, Bigger Thomas comprehends his involvement therein

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 76 only when he is judged for his crimes, for court reminds him of “a vast but delicate machine whose wheels would whir no matter what was pitted against them” (NS 399). We are, however, constantly reminded of his predicament therein through authorial comments as well as a web of symbols that point to it.

Among them, the furnace stands out and is worth closer analysis.

Not only is it the gadget Bigger is instructed to take care of, but also the oven becomes his instrument for the destruction of the evidence of his crime. Above all, the furnace becomes an image of his state of mind.

Whereas initially the fire in it is “white-hot” (NS 159), the interior of the furnace is repeatedly described as a “red bed” (NS 89, 122) in the aftermath, an allusion to Mary’s final repose in it as well as Bigger’s guilt.

Consequently, the colour symbolism is intensified: “the torrid cracks of the furnace gleamed in the crimson darkness” (NS 220) “suffusing a red glare over everything” (NS 215). These intensified descriptions are in accordance with the growing elaborateness of Bigger’s version of the disappearance of Mary. Just like he adds further details to it daydreaming of his possible escape at the end of his story, by constantly feeding the oven with more coal he overlooks the fact that he has to clear it from the ashes to provide it with enough air, that is to be discharged of all suspicions against himself. Yet, he has to keep the fire going not only to provide heat, but mostly in order not to arouse any doubts.

Consequently, the furnace becomes an image that is ever-present in himself and is attributed animal and human features that relate it to Bigger:

“the fire sang in Bigger’s ears and he saw the red shadows dance on the

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 77 walls” (NS 186), and it becomes “blindingly red” (NS 200). Furthermore, the oven is described as “an enraged beast” (NS 215) over which Bigger loses control, for he can’t stop its “muffled breathing” (NS 224) and whispering (cf. NS 239). When the kiln is finally cleared from its ashes, they do not cover the remnants of Mary Dalton any longer, and with the appearance of her ashes also Bigger’s tale and existence is doomed to end up as such: “the fear that surged into his stomach, filling him, choking him, was like the fumes of smoke that had belched from the ash bin” since “he himself was a huge furnace now through which no air could go” (NS 248).

In Invisible Man, the concept of the individual entrenched in larger patterns that direct him is present throughout the novel. In fact, it takes the protagonist a long time to realise that “he registers with his sense but short- circuits with his brain” (IM 94). In retrospect, these postulations of the vet at the Golden Day make sense, as it is unveiled that Invisible Man has

“learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He’s invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your Mr. Norton‘s dreams, sir! The mechanical man” (IM 94). This concept of the negative can be extended to the incidents at Liberty Paints and the character of Lucius Brockway. Whereas Brockway thinks of himself as an indispensable part of the industrial plant and considers the position he and Invisible Man hold in it, their being “machines inside the machine” (IM 217), as an achievement to boast of, he is no more than the negative of his aspirations: in fact, Brockway is poignantly kept in a “deep basement” (IM 207) out of sight, and his success is nothing more than a distortion of reality, the illumination of a negative photograph in which

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 78 black is turned into white. This is also shown by his fear of being replaced at his job. Additionally, his contribution to the production of “Optic White” further highlights this reversed perception of reality and unveils a parallel between himself and Dr. Bledsoe, for “like the college president, Brockway has made himself indispensable as an efficient Uncle Tom and has built himself a private empire within the limits granted by the whites, and like him he suffers from delusions of grandeur caused by his personal success”

(Gysin 225).

Brockway is furthermore the negative of the protagonist himself who, in turn, is in danger of becoming like him in his aspirations towards success, that is towards whiteness. Not only does Invisible Man mistrust him straight from the beginning due to the attitude of superiority he displays, but the protagonist’s senses also register details that point towards

Brockway’s and consequently his own predicament within the machine.

“Does this paint go to your head? Are you drinking it?” (IM 227), he asks, a question which relates to a previous observation that Brockway “had been drinking from a white mug” (IM 224). Additionally, the narrator notices that his superior is “trembling like the needle of one of the gauges”

(IM 224) as soon as his position within the machine is apparently endangered. Mr. Norton’s prophecy that “you are important because if you fail I have failed by one individual, one defective cog” (IM 45) thus also applies to Brockway, because Invisible Man turns out to be the cog that does not uphold his pretence of a smooth integration in the machinery of whiteness any longer.

The consequent fight between them is Invisible Man’s first act of

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 79 rebellion against this machine that encapsulates him and is a further exposure of the negative of his aspirations to the lights of reality that shape it. Not only does the explosion of the machine that launches him “into a wet blast of black emptiness that was somehow a bath of whiteness” (IM

230) parallel “the historical fact of the southern Negroes’ failure to establish themselves in northern industry” (Gysin 220), but it is also a further prerequisite to Invisible Man for the vision of the entire picture of himself instead of only of its negative.

2.3. Communism: Black and Red Brothers?

Communism plays a big role in Invisible Man and Native Son.

Whereas the official aim of the political party was to achieve the brotherhood of the suppressed including the “American Negro population

as an aspect of a broader pattern of imperialism” (Bone 1968, 115), within the novels, it is portrayed in two distinct ways. In “Blueprint for

Negro Writing,” Richard Wright explains that “Marxism is but the starting point. No theory of life can take the place of life.” His novel Native Son is constructed according to this principle, for “after Marxism has laid bare the skeleton of society, there remains the task of the writer to plant flesh upon those bones” (qtd. in Kinnamon 1973, 71). In fact, in the last section of

Native Son, which is entitled “Fate,” Bigger’s life is literally spoiled to these “bones” by the Communist lawyer Boris Max in accordance with the portrayal of his “flesh” in the first two sections “Fear” and “Flight.” In contrast to this approach, in Ralph Ellison’s novel the Brotherhood aspires

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 80 to reducing Invisible Man to his bones, that is to a mere formula, an object to be modelled according to collective needs.

An aspect both novels have in common is the innocuous reaction of their protagonists on the occasion of their first contact with the political organization. When Invisible Man is addressed as a “brother” in the meeting of the union at Liberty Paints he accidentally bumps into, he is flattered by this salutation: “Even after my weeks in the North this was surprising” (IM 219), he ponders, only to be expelled from the meeting as a potential fink. Bigger as well is not familiar with Communism; he contents himself with the definition of his peer Jack that “it’s a race of folks who live in Russia” and concludes that “they must be wild” (NS 63) when they see The Gay Woman at the cinema. When the personification of this gay, wild woman, that is Mary Dalton, enquires about Bigger’s political orientation at the meeting with “Mr. Capitalist” Dalton, this makes him uncomfortable, for “he knew nothing about unions, except that they were considered bad,” and “he did not know what a capitalist was” (NS 83).

Just as “for Mary and Jan, Bigger is an abstraction — a symbol of exploitation rather than someone whose feelings they have ever really tried to understand” (Margolies 1969, 118), to Bigger they are the embodiment of the image of Communism he has absorbed so far:

He remembered seeing many cartoons of Communists in

newspapers and always they had flaming torches in their hands and

wore beards and were trying to commit murder or set things on fire.

People who acted that way were crazy. All he could recall having

heard about Communists was associated in his mind with darkness,

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 81

old houses, people speaking in whispers, and trade unions on strike.

(NS 97)

This hostile and stereotyped delineation includes associations that are not only reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan, but also does it parallel the typecast depiction of the Negro population as an evil pole within society and, finally, the portrayal of Bigger himself in the aftermath of his murder. The protagonist is well aware of this connection. In fact, he draws on this bond with Communism in order to cover up his crime, for, “after all, was not Jan a red? Was not his word as good as Jan’s” (NS 119)?

Consequently, being “red” truly becomes the membership of another race rather than a mere political affiliation, for the investigations about Mary’s disappearance follow the hints provided by Bigger and result in a downright witch hunt against the red enema. Jan’s citizenship is doubted by journalists, a Jewish background is suspected, to them “it’s classic! It’s a natural” (NS 244) for a sensational story filled with biased facts.

This distortion of facts and their inclusion in the story is the reason for the Communist Party to get to the barricades through the personality of

Boris Max as Bigger’s defence lawyer. While in the first two books “much is perceived through the barely awakened consciousness of Bigger,” it becomes clear that “it is never the instrument that Wright needs to tell the whole story. To place Bigger’s life in perspective, he requires another angle of vision, a perception more intellectual and informed” (Bloom 76), that is Boris Max’s point of view. We can speculate in how far the lawyer reflects the author himself, for Wright was also a disciple of Communism

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 82

(cf. Ford 29), and, as Michel Fabre quotes him, his “ideal for people

‘writing from the Left,’ as he does, should be to ‘create in the minds of other people a picture that would impel them to meaningful activity” (qtd. in Fabre 67). Boris Max attempts to achieve exactly such a significant decision from the court that presides over Bigger’s fate. In effect, he portrays his client as a victim of circumstances and, consequently, as a symbolic touchstone for the humanity of civilisation and its willingness to change accordingly. “If I can make the people of this country understand why this boy acted like he did, I’ll be doing more than defending him” (NS

322) is, in fact, the outline that shapes his strategy of defence. However, this approach does not work out, as Bigger is sentenced to death. Even worse, Max leaves him back in dismay, for he does not comprehend

Bigger’s insistence on his murders as his free choice, nor does he truly see his client as an individual. Daniel Aaron alleges that “Wright made

Communists out to be insensitive fools like Jan and Mary. Even Boris Max never really understands Bigger, and is frightened by Bigger’s vision of himself. Not a single white character, in fact, has any appreciation of what is going on in Bigger’s mind” (45). This assumption can be dismissed in relation to Jan Erlone, for he transcends the mere theoretical formulations postulated by Max and embodies them in his emotional sphere as well:

I was in jail grieving for Mary and then I thought of all the black

men who had to grieve when their people were snatched from

them in slavery and since slavery. I thought that if they could stand

it, then I ought to. … At first I thought old man Dalton was trying

to frame me, and I wanted to kill him. And when I heard that you’d

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 83

done it, I wanted to kill you. And then I got to thinking. I saw if I

killed, this thing would go on and on and never stop. (NS 318)

Bigger’s reaction to these concessions proves this, for he feels that Jan

“had come up to him, flung aside the curtain and walked into the room of his life. … A particle of white rock had detached itself from that looming mountain of white hate and had rolled down the slope, stopping at his feet”

(NS 319). As “Wright had perceived the important failure of Marxism to treat the human personality” (Fabre 160) and consequently broken with party politics (cf. Bone 1968, 143), Jan could be seen as the personification of a younger, refreshed Communism that weighs its hypotheses against individual exigencies and thus fulfils Wright’s ideal vision of the doctrine.

In Invisible Man, a comparable constellation of characters emerges in the Brotherhood, where “both significant efforts of the Communist Party to combat American racism and its use of blacks for its own political ends are woven into the novel’s Brotherhood, especially in the racial dynamics between its white and black leaders, and in the suspicion cast on it for its role on the race riot that concludes the novel’s action” (Sundquist 19).

Brother Jack as the head of it incorporates its principles to the point of self- sacrifice, and other members such as Tobitt and Wrestrum follow his example, whereas Clifton and Tarp, who are both black, retain or regain their individuality to some extent.

Invisible Man’s introduction into the party is already telling for the principles on which it is based: a participant who invites the protagonist to sing a spiritual is forced to leave the room, for by doing so he violates the dictum that the form matters whereas the content is at best of secondary

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 84 importance. “Some of our brothers aren’t so highly developed” (IM 314), the protagonist is informed by Emma, a declaration he had already heard before applied to himself at the meeting of the union at Liberty Paints (cf.

IM 222). The impression that results from such statements is that the

Brotherhood is a machine no less than the one that explodes at Liberty

Paints: it forges individuality into mobile stencils that adapt to larger patterns and the development of its members is consequently equalled to their adaptability to it. Again, individuals are downgraded to “a cog in a machine” (IM 396), a definition Brother Jack proudly applies to himself.

The paramount importance of the committee provides further support for this thesis, as Invisible Man is informed that he is “not hired to think. For all of us, the committee does the thinking. For all of us. And you were hired to talk” (IM 469-470).

There are, however, other members who question the self-declared

“champions of a scientific approach to society” (IM 350) in the

Brotherhood or bring its hollow principles to light, be it consciously or unconsciously. Emma is a prime example: not only does she function as a mere servant in the meeting, but she is also attributed a minor role within the organisation due to her sex. In fact, the “sisters” are left out of this brotherhood of men and have to content themselves with the pouring of drinks, the role of wardrobe mistress or pure ornaments of the brothers.

Their inferiority in this “red microcosm” parallels that of Negroes within society as a whole.

The black brothers also hold a special position within the group.

Brother Tarp gives Invisible Man his chain link as a present and, even

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 85 though he does not fully understand this gesture, the similarity the protagonist makes out between Tarp and his grandfather can be valued as a reminder not to neglect one’s identity and past. Brother Tod Clifton is even more relevant, for he faces Ras, is fascinated by this counter pole of individualism to the collective proceedings of the Brotherhood and realises that “sometimes a man has to plunge outside history” (IM 377). Brother

Tarp’s and Clifton’s fascination with individuality is in sharp contrast to the discipline of the Brotherhood and can be valued as the reason for their break with it. Whereas Tarp leaves without a trace, Invisible Man encounters Clifton again on the streets of Harlem selling paper dolls.

Unaware of the motives behind this step, the protagonist witnesses

Clifton’s shooting by a policeman and wonders why he has “chosen to step off the platform and fall beneath the train” (IM 439), that is why he has opted to be “running and dodging the forces of history instead of making a dominating stand” (IM 441) through the Brotherhood. When the narrator takes up the responsibility of organising the brother’s funeral, he becomes aware that “men out of time” like Clifton could be “the saviors, the true leaders, the bearers of something precious” (IM 441) first of all because of the masses that take part in it, but even more so because of the

Brotherhood’s insistence that Clifton’s membership in it moved the people to join the memorial service. While Invisible Man is personally attached to

Clifton, to the other brothers “the body of Brutus” (IM 465) is irrelevant in that individuals “don’t count” (IM 291). Yet, Clifton’s death is harnessed, for it “initiates the Harlem riots, which serve the Brotherhood’s new purpose of pacifying the Negro by exhausting his hate-charged energies in

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 86 meaningless self-conflict,” and to Invisible Man this “is at last a terrible mockery of his decent intentions” (Baumbach 83).

The perception of history is another aspect worth considering, for the Brotherhood claims it as its monopoly and consolidates its ideology therein. In fact, history is born within the Brotherhood and requires the capability “of rising to the necessity of the historical situation” (IM 291), that is to adjust to the scheme of possession and dispossession. The past is of little importance in this process and, unless lived in accordance with the doctrine of the party, it is best left behind. Invisible Man experiences this when he is given a new name and asked to omit all contacts with his past life. Furthermore, Brother Jack’s comparison of the old couple at the eviction scene with “dead limbs that must be pruned away so that the tree may bear young fruit or the storms of history will blow them down anyway” (IM 291) proves this. Members that betray the dogma of the

Brotherhood are considered to be “outside the groove of history.” Invisible

Man’s “job is to get them in, all of them” (IM 443).

The speed with which this occurs is, however, again determined by the committee for, as Invisible Man suspects, “the brakes must be put on the old wheel of history, … or is it the little wheels within the wheel” (IM

504)? He experiences this himself when he gets an anonymous letter that advises him not to go too fast, for “if you get too big they will cut you down” (IM 383). This contrasts his gullible assumption that his co- operation in the Brotherhood is “a job that promised to exercise my talent for public speaking” (IM 298), for he is to propagate pre-established statements that follow the validation “that it’s impossible not to take

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 87 advantage of the people” and “the trick is to take advantage of them in their own best interest” (IM 504). This rationale

ignores the unpredictable element at the core of our humanity

which transcends politics and science and history and is at once

more fundamental and mysterious than these. In an organization

which is proud of its willingness to sacrifice the individual on the

altar of history, the protagonist remains as invisible as ever. His loss

of individuality is felt most keenly when his sense of responsibility

collides with the iron discipline of the Brotherhood. Eventually he

realizes that behind the façade of party discipline, Brother Jack has

been ‘running’ him no less cynically than Norton or Bledsoe. (Bone

1968, 208)

Through the occurrence of Brother Jack’s loss of his glass eye, Invisible

Man becomes even more aware that “even for the Brothers, the Negro is a thing, an object, an instrument of power politics and of preordained historical design, rather than a divinely complex and complicated human mystery” (Margolies 1968, 142). In fact, while to Jack the prosthesis replaces a loss “in the line of duty” (IM 475) towards conformity to higher principles, Invisible Man muses “which eye is really the blind one” (IM

478): the one made of flesh and blood that sees in him “one of the raw materials to be shaped” (IM 472) according to the principles of the

Brotherhood, or the artificial limb, which triggers off the feeling that he

“was just awakening from a dream” (IM 476)? However, these doubts dawn slowly upon Invisible Man, for he is still walking on “the same legs on which I’ve come so far from home. And yet they were somehow new”

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 88

(IM 335).

3. Acts of Emancipation and Reconstruction

President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 was intended to guarantee that “the South’s slaves would soon be legally free”

(Fremon 13). The objective of the Reconstruction Act of 1867 was not only the incorporation of Southern States into the Union, but it also allowed for supervision “that the civil rights of the former slaves were protected as they made the transition to freedom” (Fremon 18). To blacks, however, reality proved to be different due to the practice of Jim Crowing, which “became more than a set of laws. It referred to a way of life that was full of limitations for African Americans. In some ways, these humiliations were as bad as slavery” (Fremon 27). In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech in Washington in front of crowds that had gathered to demonstrate for the civil rights that blacks had not yet been fully conceded in spite of the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which

“granted full citizenship to all people born or naturalized in the United

States, including blacks” (Fremon 21). In his speech, King exposes the gap between reality and the ideal President Lincoln had asserted in 1863, which to Negroes

came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later the Negro still is not free. One hundred

years later the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the

manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One

hundred years later the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 89

the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years

later the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society

and finds himself in exile in his own land. (King 2266-2267)

Martin Luther King’s words, “I have a dream,” have entered the books of history not only due to their rhetorical qualities, but mostly due to the longing for freedom they convey as a universal trait of all races that know oppression:

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the

difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a

dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that

one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its

creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are

created equal.’5 (King 2268)

In Ralph Ellison’s and Richard Wright’s novels, this dream is still out of reach for their protagonists. In fact, Bigger Thomas and Invisible

Man live in a time span that lies in between these two events, that is presumably in the first half of the twentieth century. The protagonists are far from being accepted as full citizens of the United States. In fact, their lives represent “a relentless unreality, unreal in that the Negro as a group is loved, hated, persecuted feared, and envied, while as an individual he is unfelt, unheard, unseen — to all intents and purposes invisible” (Baumbach

74). Barred from the full participation in the economic, political and, above all, social life, Bigger feels like “on the outside of the world peeping in

5 “We hold these truths…” is a sentence from the Declaration of Independence of 1776.

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 90 through the knot-hole in the fence” (NS 50). Such a sensation is also dawning upon Invisible Man, and to him it is “a queer feeling that I was playing a part in some scheme which I did not understand” (IM 170). In fact, “Wright’s works are reactions to a false identity, whereas Invisible

Man emphasizes the search for identity” (Gysin 278).

What Native Son and Invisible Man have in common is the depiction of black selves who live in an environment that impedes their development. Gayle Addison, Jr. asserts that each Negro “envisions a coming Götterdämmerung, when, like the existential hero, he undertakes the establishment of his own identity by destroying in total the oppressive, restrictive societal apparatus which he secretly loathes” (178). In both novels, the protagonists follow such a scheme in their search for identity: through what we can call “acts of emancipation,” they free themselves from the strictures of the white world and, consequently, they reconstruct it as they are an integral part of it as well. This relates to Mead’s conception of the self as depending on its involvement in social processes in which

“the attitudes of others which one assumes as affecting his own conduct

which constitute the ‘me’” (176). In this chain reaction, what Mead labels as the “I” comes in: “It is the answer which the individual makes to the attitude which others take towards him when he assumes an attitude towards them. … The ‘I,’ then, in this relation of the ‘I’ and the ‘me,’ is something that is, so to speak, responding to a social situation which is within the experience of the individual” (Mead 177).

In abstract terms, the “me” can be equated with conformity and conventions, whereas the “I” is constituted by individual and independent

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 91 reactions to it. This dual concept can be expanded to various conditions that are present within the novels, most obviously, the duality between black and white; furthermore, also the difference between expectations and their fulfilment; the categories of “Niggerness” and “Blackness” and, above all, in the disparity between the way individuals perceive themselves and the mode they are identified by others. Similarities to Ralph Waldo

Emerson’s conceptions about the individual become apparent:

It is not to be denied that there must be some wide difference

between my faith and other faith; and mine is a certain brief

experience, which surprised me in the highway or in the market, in

some place, at some time, — whether in the body or out of the

body, God knoweth, — and made me aware that I had played the

fool with fools all this time, but that law existed for me and for all;

that to me belonged trust, a child’s trust and obedience, and the

worship of ideas, and I should never be fool more. (“The

Transcendentalist” 205)

The distinction between a public and a private self that this passage implies also accompanies Bigger Thomas and Invisible Man on their quests.

Whereas the first part of the present paper focused on the conventions and expectations which shape their deeds and on their actions in accordance to their prefabricated roles of “Niggers,” in the following chapters their liberation from these schemes as well as the way they comprehend and eschew such categorisations will move to the centre of attention. Thus, their private selves take the place of their public selves, the focal point shifts from Bigger’s and Invisible Man’s “me” to their “I” in Meadian

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 92 terms.

3.1. Initiation Rites

In his memories, Invisible Man recollects his teacher Woodridge back at college in the South and a discussion following the lecture on

James Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In this debate, the teacher advised his pupils that “our task is that of making ourselves individuals. The conscience of a race is the gift of its individuals who see, evaluate, record…We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We will have created a culture” (IM 354). The formation of Invisible Man’s individuality is, however, “stifled by many levels of convention” (Ousby

309) just like Stephen Dedalus’, and so is Bigger’s fate. In fact, he and

Invisible Man are “feeling the capacity to be, to live, to pour out the spirit of their souls into concrete and objective form with a high fervor born of their racial characteristics,” but, nevertheless, “they glide through our complex civilization like wailing ghosts; they spin like fiery planets lost from their orbits; they wither and die like trees ripped from native soil”

(NS 425).

Since in the first book of Native Son Wright records “Bigger’s activities in such a way as to prove that all of Bigger’s waking existence is a kind of meaninglessness — a mind of death” (Margolies 1968, 107),

Bigger is aware of his predicament, whereas in Ellison’s novel “the invisible man hardly recognizes the disparity between his expectations and the actual situation” (Smith 29). However, it dawns upon him as well that

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 93

“everybody wanted to use you for some purpose” (IM 294) and that by his mere fulfillment of these expectations, his prerogatives as an individual do not meet his aspirations. The fact that “it is his life and no mere abstraction in someone’s head,” and that, consequently, “he must live it and try to grasp its complexity until he can change it; must live it as he changes it”

(Kumasi 73-74) drives Invisible Man as well as Bigger Thomas to embrace the principles of Emerson, which the vet at the Golden Day applied to himself:

I’m nobody’s father except my own. Perhaps that’s the advice to

give to you: Be your own father, young man. And remember, the

world is possibility if only you’ll discover it. (IM 156)

The realisation of this maxim occurs in different ways within the novels.

Whereas Bigger applies violence as a means to free himself, Invisible Man undergoes a more subtle process of changes that leads him from the blind execution of imposed roles to the use of his own intuition. The common bond between the two characters is the flight from tuition to self-reliance, from the assumption that “you think me the child of my circumstances” to the affirmation that “I make my circumstance” (Emerson, “The

Transcendentalist” 196). This internal journey is triggered off by events that can be related to initiation rites, as they are an induction to a new and broadened horizon of perceptions as well as capabilities of action.

3.1.1. Bigger’s Blasting of White Walls

Bigger Thomas’ life is constantly ruled and restricted by the white

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 94 world around him:

Not only had he lived where they told him to live, not only had he

done what they told him to do, not only had he done these things

until he had killed to be quit of them; but even after obeying, after

killing, they still ruled him. He was their property, heart and soul,

body and blood; what they did claimed every atom of him, sleeping

and walking; it colored life and dictated the terms of death. (NS

361)

This impression is emphasised in the scene where Bigger is visited by his family while he is awaiting trial in his cell. Bigger’s peers, the Daltons, the

State Attorney, a Reverend, Boris Max and Jan Erlone join them. Richard

Wright explains the implausibility of the accumulation of so many visitors with the detail that what he “wanted that scene to say to the reader was more important than its surface reality or plausibility” (NS 27), and it truly summarises the external forces that have determined Bigger in his deeds as well as the gap he experiences between the black and white reality of his life. “The presence of that white mountain looming behind him” (NS 328) in prison is, in fact, a metaphor for his entire condition “as the terrain where environment and individuality meet to produce the subjectivity unacknowledged either in the stereotype retailed by racist discourse or in the traditional narrative modes of social fiction” (Reilly 1990, 50).

The climax of this predicament goes further back: it is undoubtedly the car ride with Mary Dalton and her friend Jan and its culmination in

Bigger’s murder. First of all, in this episode hierarchic structures to which

Bigger has been conditioned all his life are turned upside down. Not only is

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 95 he included in a conspiracy against his employer by driving Mary to her red boyfriend instead of university, but their approaches towards him as their equal also leave him miserable and full of shame. Furthermore,

Bigger is continually aware of his blackness against the pale complexion of the other riders: “he felt he had no physical existence at all right then; he was something that he hated, the badge of shame which he knew was attached to a black skin. It was a shadowy region, a No Man’s Land, the ground that separated the white world from the black that he stood upon”

(NS 98). This implies that Bigger is torn between adjustment to the present situation and the assurance of dissociation that has outlined his existence so far, for “how on earth could he learn not to say yessuh and yessum to white people in one night when he had been saying it all his life long” (NS 104)?

This antagonism is rendered even more effective by his role as passenger in the car so that “there were white people to either side of him; he was sitting between two vast white looming walls” (NS 99).

Bigger experiences this conflict as painful especially in regard to

Mary Dalton. “In his relations with her he felt that he was riding a seesaw; never were they on common level; either he or she was up in the air” (NS

103). Earl E. Baughman attests that when a black person is first thrown into close interaction with whites, “the self-esteem he has generated in a basically black context can be threatened” (45). Truly, “Bigger can wave a dead rat in Vera’s face until she faints, but he becomes tongue-tied and withdrawn in the presence of Mary Dalton” (Harris 81). Bigger‘s constant impression of being an object of ridicule to Mary and Jan additionally fuels his sense of alienation, and as he “discovers that he does not measure up

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 96 well in interactions with whites, two psychological paths are open to him.

… He has a choice between looking inward and finding the insufficiency there, or looking outward and finding the inadequacy there” (Baughman

45).

The concern with the outer appearance of conformity accompanies

Bigger throughout this journey. It contrasts with his inner world, in which

“his entire mind and body were painfully concentrated into a single sharp point of attention. He was trying desperately to understand” (NS 98).

Initially, Bigger remains inert: “He knew that they would not have cared if he had made himself more comfortable, but his moving would have called attention to himself and his black body” (NS 100). “What would people passing along the street think” (NS 98), Bigger ponders when Jan shakes hands with him, and, similarly, he is reluctant to enter Ernie’s Kitchen

Shack due to the black gaze of wonder his white cohort is likely to arouse there. These intimidating gawks accompany him straight back to Drexel

Boulevard, where Bigger speculates “what a white man would think seeing him here with her like this” (NS 113), that is with a drunk white Mary

Dalton he is about to carry inside her home.

Within the house, however, this perception is altered. Not only is

Mary powerless due to her inebriation, but Bigger is also vested with a sense of individuality and freedom he has lacked up to then. In fact, the darkness of the night as well as the secrecy of the entire situation contrast with the recurring notions of observance Bigger experiences. He becomes the observer and, at the same time, assumes to be unseen. Thus, “a sense of physical elation” (NS 115) Bigger feels towards Mary is not suppressed

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 97 even though he knows of the potential danger his presence in Mary’s bedroom constitutes: “ … he leaned over her, excited, looking at her face in the dim light, not wanting to take his hands from her breasts” (NS 116).

The limitedness of this delight of sovereignty and invisibility is, however, abruptly interrupted by Bigger’s perception of a creaking door:

He turned and a hysterical terror seized him, as though he were

falling from a great height in a dream. A white blur was standing in

the door, silent, ghostlike. It filled his eyes and gripped his body. It

was Mrs. Dalton. (NS 116)

Even though Mrs. Dalton is blind and thus unable to make him out optically, she poses a gigantic menace to Bigger. In fact, “she is the white world, deceptively fragile, but immensely threatening to the young black man, for she carries with her, for all her seeming weakness, the implacable power of a white world that hates blacks and makes them feel ashamed and guilty” (Bryant 304). This is shown by the apprehensive pose Bigger takes with his head “cocked at an angle that enabled him to see Mary and Mrs.

Dalton by merely shifting his eyes” (NS 117) and, above all, by his convulsion to silence the daughter by pressing a pillow on her face.

This “scene with the semiconscious girl and her blind mother emphasizes Bigger’s invisibility and underscores white myopia in dealing with blacks” (Gross Avery 20), but it also impressively evokes the dread of

Bigger’s existence. In fact, it draws on images that belong to the genre of horror. This effect is intensified when Bigger has to get rid of Mary’s corpse first of all through its move from the top to the basement of an inhabited house. The necessity to behead Mary with a hatchet in order to be

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 98 able to ram her into the furnace intensifies the feeling of agony, not only

Bigger’s, but also the readers’. An incident that parallels the appearance of

Mrs. Dalton in the bedroom aggravates the entire depiction of anxiety to a further climax of shock:

A noise made him whirl; two green burning pools — pools of

accusation and guilt — stared at him from a white blur that sat

perched upon the edge of the trunk. His mouth opened in a silent

scream and his body became hotly paralysed. It was the white cat

and its round green eyes gazed past him at the white face hanging

limply from the fiery furnace door. (NS 123)

In the face of these horrors, Bigger nevertheless regains his senses for “he felt that he had been in the grip of a weird spell and was now free”

(NS 118). As soon as he realises his accidental homicide of Mary, he starts to plan his actions according to the new consciousness he has achieved with a startling precision and objectivity: “She was dead; she was white; she was a woman; he had killed her; he was black; he might be caught; he did not want to be caught; if he were they would kill him” (NS 121). We can agree with Katherine Fishburn when she claims that “Bigger launches himself onto a higher plane of existence where he alone is responsible for himself and his crimes” (99), for by his deeds and even more so by his plots to cover them up he truly transcends or blasts the white walls that have been surrounding him all along. In fact, Bigger acts upon the assumption that “though he had not raped Mary Dalton, he was guilty of

‘rape’ of a different kind: the irresistible urge to strike back when he was forced against a wall by the horde of ruthless white enemies” (Glicksberg

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 99

105). Consequently, he “did not feel sorry for Mary; she was not real to him, not a human being” (NS 143).

3.1.2. The Erasure of Invisible Man’s supposed Visibility

In the first speech he gives in the name of the Brotherhood,

Invisible Man uses the image of two blind men that help each other along to describe the way the “uncommon people” are made to accept their lower position by those who hold power over them: “Think about it, they’ve dispossessed us each of one eye from the day we’re born. So now we can only see in straight white lines” (IM 343). Even though he includes himself in this set of people, he is not yet fully aware of the implications of the statement on his own existence. In fact, he still assumes the Brotherhood to provide him with the second eye he needs to see the full picture before him.

Yet, his membership in the organisation proves to be the denouement of a series of self-deceptions on the way to the protagonist’s complete disillusionment, as “in each of the various analogous episodes, the hero is torn between his implicit commitment to his grandfather’s position — subversive acquiescence — and his will to identify — the primal instinct of self-assertion” (Baumbach 76). Their climax reaches further back to his first days in New York.

The encounter with Mr. Emerson, Jr. forms the beginning of

Invisible Man’s initiation into his invisible condition. Not only does it begin a chain reaction that ends with the protagonist’s loss of identity, but it also contains allusions to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s philosophy on the

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 100 worth of the individual. The two Emersons we are presented with in the novel thereby form the distortion of these philosophical principles. His son, to whom the protagonist gains personal access, depicts the old Emerson as a remote figure to whom individuality and authority are interchangeable concepts. Emerson, Jr., however, is everything but his own father, as he first of all depends on his parent. In this regard, he can be considered as foil to Invisible Man, for the narrator counts on Emerson, Sr. as well. In fact, he is the last of the seven trustees that may provide him with a job and thus he is the last chance to secure his return to the South and Dr. Bledsoe.

Through the unveiling of the true content of the supposed letters of recommendation by Emerson, Jr., Emerson, Sr. and the college president are revealed to be “loyal Americans” (IM 185). The term “loyalty” is distorted and refers to their conspiracy to keep Invisible Man running around without purpose and to secure their own power thereby. In relation to these events, Emerson, Jr.’s allusions to Huckleberry Finn and Jim6 are not far-fetched and represent more than a clumsy reduction of the protagonist to a mere type, as the homoerotic implications in their conversation suggest. Emerson, Jr. ultimately frees Invisible Man from his compulsion to “Bledsoeing” and, furthermore, draws his attention to a job at Liberty Paints. Therefore, we can say that Emerson Jr. becomes the father of a disillusioned Invisible Man.

At the industrial plant, Invisible Man’s contribution to the

6 Huckleberry Finn and Jim are characters from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, a novel about the relation between its adolescent narrator Huck and the black slave Jim which reveals the condition of slavery as a universal injustice that lacks all rationality and even more emotionality.

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 101 production of ‘Optic White’ deserves further attention. Not only does he add remover to it, but “der Vorgang in der Farbenfabrik ist teils Anfang von etwas Neuem: der Protagonist sieht genauer als ein Weißer, und zwar

‘durchschaut’ er scheinbar völlige ‘Weißheit’” (Dietz 74). The culmination of his work in the fight with Lucius Brockway is also telling, for he threatens Invisible Man that “I’LL KILL YOU, THAT’S WHAT!”, and to the protagonist’s question “YOU’LL KILL WHO?”, he replies “YOU,

THAT’S WHO!” (IM 225). In the blast that follows this argument, this

“you” of the protagonist, which we can equate to his perception by his environment, is severely damaged.

The renewal of Invisible Man’s “you” at the factory hospital is one of the key passages in the novel. It is highly captivating not only due to its richness of allusions, but mostly because of its surrealistic depiction. In fact, it is reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung, in which the protagonist Gregor Samsa wakes up as a beetle one day, and it also resembles the world of the absurd heroes in the works of the likes of

Camus, Ionesco or Beckett.7

The question of the protagonist’s name, which we as readers do not have yet, is taken up in this section. In fact, Invisible Man himself realises

“that I no longer knew my own name” (IM 239). However, to his dismay he is informed about his appellation by “a tall austere-looking man in a white coat” (IM 245). We as readers are left to doubt whether the unspoken name the protagonist is attributed is his real identity or just a further imposed label of distinction. In any way, the whole process of designation

7 They depict man as “a stranger in an inhuman universe” (Ousby 1).

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 102 as depicted in Invisible Man resembles the anonymity of the black people as a collective in a white universe. The blank that the protagonist’s namelessness leaves could be filled with an “X,” just like in Malcolm X’s autobiography. At the same time, this vagueness strengthens the universal appeal of his quests, since his namelessness facilitates identification with

Invisible Man. “Invisible Man thus refers by implication to the key role played by anonymity, or namelessness, throughout African American history, from the destruction of African family identities in the slave trade through the legal strictures of the twentieth century” (Sundquist 4).

The treatment that is imposed upon Invisible Man at the hospital opens up various approaches of interpretation. Besides the personal significance it has to the protagonist, the factory hospital in Invisible Man also assumes the traits of a racist society in which the race of the Negro is transformed into that of “Niggers.” Invisible Man himself apprehends that the conversation of the medical staff “sounded like a discussion of history”

(IM 236). Furthermore, the treatment he undergoes resembles methods of oppression that have been applied to keep blacks in their place. First of all, the protagonist has no room to move, for he is fixed to a machine. When he complains about this immobility, he is informed that it is “a necessary part of the treatment” and that he will “get used to it after a while” (IM 235).

Secondly, Invisible Man overhears a debate about further medication that points in a similar direction. The use of electric shock therapy instead of surgery is chosen, as the doctors’ “concept is Gestalt” and aims at a transformation of Invisible Man’s persona so that “society will suffer no traumata on his account” (IM 236). To the amusement of the observers that

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 103 are assembled around him, the protagonist is consequently reduced to

“dancing” (IM 237) due to the electrical shocks he suffers, an image that ties to the dancing dolls he is to encounter later on. The result of the therapy is that when the protagonist endeavours a “plunging into the blackness of my mind” (IM 239), he finds himself “back in the clinging white mist” (IM 241) instead.

The musical background enforces such a reading, for Ludwig van

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is often referred to as “Schicksalssymphonie.”

Beethoven himself was at odds with his arising deafness and he said that

“ich will dem Schicksal in den Rachen greifen” (Scherliess). This resembles Invisible Man’s personal fate. Fritz Gysin claims that “in this process, accommodation is driven to absurdity; the black man is to be turned into a ‘nigger,’ a pawn of the whites, whose thoughts, feelings and emotions should henceforth be predetermined in the same way as the current reduces his movements to dancing” (228). Actually, the first point in question is whether the treatment really occurs the way the protagonist recollects it, for initially, he is said to be merely “stunned” (IM 231) and given various liquids to drink, which could be tranquillizers. Thus, the subsequent medication could be a mere hallucination, which, however, reveals a deeper understanding of his condition that is rooted in his subconscious.

Picking up Gysin’s reflections, I would furthermore argue that the cures Invisible Man undergoes can be regarded as a form of neutralization of the attitude of accommodation, which has basically delineated his entire existence up to this point in the novel, through over-exposition to

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 104 whiteness. In fact, whereas the protagonist initially assumes that “my mind was blank, as though I had just begun to live” (IM 233), the doctors “hit upon an old identity” by reminding him of “Buckeye the Rabbit” and “Brer

Rabbit” (IM 242) and his childhood. Furthermore, before his release

Invisible Man is “overcome with ceremonial feelings but unable to remember the proper formula” (IM 248) in the face of the white doctor in charge. When he finally leaves the clinic, he has “the feeling that I had been talking beyond myself, had used words and expressed attitudes not my own, that I was in the grip of some alien personality lodged deep within me” (IM 249) in his inquiries about Mr. Norton and Bledsoe and wonders whether he “is no longer afraid” (IM 249). Since from this point in the novel he truly shows a relatively strong self-esteem in comparison to the time before his sojourn at the factory hospital, it can be seen as the focal point in which Invisible Man’s self-conception clashes with its public perception and a new understanding arises as a consequence. In fact, “a remote explosion had occurred somewhere, perhaps back at Emerson’s or that night in Bledsoe’s office, and it had caused the ice cap to melt and shift the slightest bit. But that bit, that fraction was irrevocable” (IM 259) and triggers off the narrator’s awareness of his supposed visibility through conformity as a mere figment of his imagination.

3.2. Uncle Tom’s Children?

Richard Wright claims that “in many sections of the South the days of Uncle Tom are over. Among the younger generation of Negroes there is

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 105 a saying that Uncle Tom is dead. Young Negroes are taking their destiny into their own hands” (qtd. in Kinnamon 73). Undoubtedly, in his depiction of Bigger Thomas in Native Son this assertion forms the base, for the protagonist truly opposes the principle of endurance that regulates Uncle

Tom’s life. James Baldwin states that “like Captain Ahab, Huck Finn, or

Jay Gatsby, Bigger Thomas is an American individualist seeking to create himself and his world in defiance of all” (qtd. in Kumasi 97). Bigger’s rebelliousness prevents Native Son from turning out to be “a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about”

(NS 23), a description Wright applies to his earlier collection of short stories, which is appropriately called Uncle Tom’s Children. We can presume that exactly this perception ignited Wright to write Bigger’s tale

“so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears” (NS 23). Ralph Ellison describes Invisible Man as “a novel about innocence and human error, a struggle through illusion to reality” (“The

Art of Fiction”177; emphasis mine). Thus, the path Invisible Man and

Bigger Thomas follow is not that of endurance, but that of rebellion. It

“allows the invisible to be seen, the inarticulate to express themselves”

(Gross Avery 9). As they no longer conform to outer expectations and rather use their growing knowledge about their surroundings, Bigger and

Invisible Man are able to manipulate instead of being themselves stage- managed by the white world. Consequently, Gertrude Stein’s demarcation of black writers like Richard Wright and his contemporaries can also be applied to Bigger and Invisible Man: “They are not Uncle Tom’s children anymore” (qtd. in Kumasi 48).

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 106

3.2.1. The Awakening of the Double Consciousness

W.E.B. DuBois reflects about the condition of the Afro-American individual in “a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self though the eyes of others” (qtd. in Werner 121). Critics have identified this dual state as the animating principle behind the protagonists’ portrayal in Invisible Man and Native Son. Klaus Schmidt claims Wright’s novel to be about the “Zwiespalt des Protagonisten, der für den größten

Teil des Romans im Konflikt zwischen Autonomie (Bigger als Subjekt) und Frendbestimmung (Bigger als Objekt) gefangen bleibt” (73). Such a conception also applies to Invisible Man, who is embarked on “a journey into self-recognition. He recognizes first that he is invisible - and second, that he is a man” (Margolies 1968, 135).

Bigger Thomas and Invisible Man can consequently be said to lead the life of “hyphenated Americans” (cf. Rieber and Green 70), a notion that summarises the necessity of the Negro’s individuality “to conform to two distinctly different cultural and behavioral patterns: his own, which was forced upon him, and that of the white majority, and by the necessity - not only for reasons of strategy - to identify himself with his group to a much larger extent than any white American is ever compelled to” (Gysin 12).

This is expressed in the hyphen that links these two worlds of blackness and whiteness, of African origins and American conditions of life, to the

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 107 essence of being Afro-American.

In Invisible Man, a first hint at the protagonist’s awakening of his hyphenated condition is already given at college. At a church service,

Invisible Man perceives “the platform and its actors as through a reversed telescope; small doll-like figures moving through some meaningless ritual”

(IM 117). The concept of the telescope is an appropriate metaphor to illustrate “what Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. DuBois called double consciousness and Ellison prefers to call double vision” (Ostendorf 100).

In fact, consciousness or vision is related to perception, especially the optic sensitivity. The telescope as a gadget of vision can be equated to the hyphen of Afro-Americans, for it first of all links two distant ideas.

Secondly, when it is used in reverse, the objects it captures are reduced in size and distanced. However, by stretching out one’s hands, the onlooker realises that the expansion between himself and the object is an optic illusion resulting from an altered perspective. What Invisible Man basically does is discover the relativity of distance or the closeness of the African and American components that shape his individuality. He stretches out his hands to learn that others’ alleged superiority is founded on his internalised inferiority; he reverses his telescope of perception to discover his worth. “I carried my sickness and though for a long time I tried to place it in the outside world, the attempt to write it down shows me that at least half of it lay within me” (IM 575), he muses in the prologue.

Dissociation is a term that is related to such distance, as it “refers to the tendency of individuals to separate, or dissociate, their ‘real’ selves from their ‘public’ selves.” Whereas Invisible Man initially appreciates this

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 108 process to be a mere “mechanism for distracting others from the unpleasant realities that may constitute the real self” (Rieber and Green 63), to Ralph

Ellison “the look across the fence increases sociability and tolerance, whereas the single vision is in danger of becoming paranoid” (Ostendorf

100). Within the novel, there are characters who hint at these positive aspects of enlarging one’s horizon and gaining insight through remoteness.

The vet from the Golden Day compels Invisible Man to see the world through a reversed telescope.

Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don’t have to

be a fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don’t believe in it

— that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a straight

jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way —

part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy.

Learn how it operates, learn how you operate …. You’re hidden

right out in the open — that is, you would be if you only realized it.

They wouldn’t see you because they don’t expect you to know

anything, since they believe they’ve taken care of that. (IM 153-

154)

Even more important than the vet is the protagonist’s grandfather and his suggestion to subvert the system by outward agreement and inner rebellion. In the prologue, the narrator reveals that he has attained this position: “I remember that I am invisible and walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones. … I learned in time though that it is possible to carry on a fight against them without their realizing it” (IM 5).

Nevertheless, it takes him a long time to understand that he has been part of

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 109 the sleeping ones rather than the awake. “I am what I yam,” he pronounces when he dares to eat yams on the streets, wondering “what and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?” (IM 266). Whereas “in his youth he thought that the past was best put at a distance, that identity could be changed at will, and that it could be defined by one’s affiliations. By the time he writes the narrative, however, he realizes that all other-imposed identities are false.

One’s true identity is the sum of one’s experiences; therefore, to deny one’s past is to deny oneself” (Smith 47). In this process of maturation, Invisible

Man’s involvement in the Brotherhood as a pawn of the party is the last intermediate stage of slumber. “Here I had thought they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn’t see either color or men” (IM 508), Invisible Man reflects.

Consequently, he employs this consciousness of his invisibility as well as the brother’s blindness to plot against them. “All right, I’d yea, yea and oui, oui and si, si and see, see them too; and I’d walk around in their guts with hobnailed boots” (IM 509), he decides in the aftermath of Clifton’s funeral.

In Native Son, Bigger Thomas experiences a similar predicament before his murder of Mary Dalton:

There was something he knew and something he felt; something the

world gave him and something he himself had; something spread

out in front of him and something spread out in back; and never in

all his life, with this black skin of his, had the two worlds, thought

and feeling, will and mind, aspiration and satisfaction, been

together; never had he felt a sense of wholeness. (NS 270-271)

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 110

Since “by killing he had faced the meaning of his life, discovering his painfully split personality, his want of wholeness, the contradiction in his nature between thought and feeling, aspiration and consummation, will and deed, ideal and reality” (Glicksberg 105), Bigger is able to unite these irreconcilable poles temporarily, to converge his own expectations with those of his surroundings. “He saw it all very sharply and simply: act like other people thought you to act, yet do what you wanted. In a certain sense he had been doing just that in a loud and rough manner all his life …”

(NS 143).

At the Daltons’, Bigger gets the opportunity to enforce his new visions upon others exactly because of his knowledge of the inferior position he holds in the household. “Bigger felt that a lot of people were like Mrs. Dalton, blind,” (NS 137) so that “if he could see while others were blind, then he could get what he wanted and never be caught at it”

(NS 136). Consequently, he dissociates his public self from his real self and plays the role of the dumb black boy. He truly becomes “a black clown” (NS 236), for “they wanted him to draw the picture and he would draw it like he wanted it” (NS 188). Thus, he truly reverses the “telescope” of perception to his own advantage. He enlarges himself by reducing his white environment to remote spectators of his personal drama without destroying their belief in power. When he faces Mrs. Dalton, he is aware that “she was really worried and wanted to ask him more questions. But he knew that she would not want to hear him tell of how drunk her daughter had been. After all, he was black and she was white” (NS 158). Similarly, he cogitates on the possibility of his safety: “if only he could cower Jan and

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 111

Britten into awe, into fear of him and his black skin and his humble manners” (NS 203).

We can say that “Bigger is indeed American and native, then, in his expression of individuality, but the paradox is that the structure was never intended to include him” (Harris 84). The realisation of this inconsistency allows him to “feel free, that his life was his, that he held his future in his hands” (NS 220) in spite of his entrapment at the Daltons’. On the contrary, the limitation to his room is an additional contribution to the awakening of

Bigger’s double vision. In fact, it enables him to overhear conversations that are led in the kitchen and provides him with useful information for his plots. The fragments of reality he picks up therein can be equated to the

American constituent of Bigger’s existence, and he adjusts his African component according to it. As a result, he becomes what we can label an

“American-African,” for he truly plays with “the tension between the

‘symbolic Negro’ and the embodiment of the effects of racism, and the desire to be recognized as a discrete human entity, as a fully human being living ‘authentically,’ transcending the absurdity of the world” (Bloom 83).

We can even go a step farther and claim that Bigger acts on the assumption that “a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind” (James, “The Self”

128), for his maxim becomes to “act just like others acted, live like they lived, and while they were not looking, do what you wanted” (NS 136).

3.2.2. The Enlightenment of Invisibility

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 112

The underground plays an important role in both Native Son and

Invisible Man. At the Daltons’, Bigger Thomas’ realm is in the basement of the house. His intrusion into Mary Dalton’s room upstairs can be valued first of all as a violation of the taboo of sexuality between black men and white women. Secondly, this infringement enables Bigger to detach himself from the position of the black, subservient “nigger” he has always refused to embody. His flight from the police and his final detention in prison can be seen as an extension of this freedom, for, even though Bigger is in open conflict with society, after his murders “the feeling of being always in the stifling embrace of an invisible force had gone from him”

(NS 180). Similarly, Invisible Man enjoys absolute freedom only when he finally falls into a manhole, burns the contents of his briefcase and resumes and writes down his past in his underground shelter from society.

While Ellison’s protagonist is in a state of hibernation, that is “a covert preparation for a more overt action” (IM 13), to Bigger his imprisonment marks the terminus of his quest. Whereas Invisible Man is intended “to discuss the prerequisites for self-realization and not to describe the forms such a self-realization might take” (Winther 271),

Native Son focuses on the active reaction to self-realization. What the protagonists have in common is the insight “that — metaphorically speaking — they have always been in the underground” (Gysin 198).

Invisible Man ponders that “I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility” (IM 7), and Boris Max summarises the horror of Bigger’s life in the oppressed black world in his plea that

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 113

[t]o send him to prison would be more than an act of mercy. You

court, the audience in the courtroom as well as the readers of the

novel would be for the first time conferring life upon him. He

would be brought for the first time within the orbit of our

civilization. He would have an identity, even though it be but a

number. (NS 429)

In Native Son, the enlightenment of Bigger’s invisibility thus occurs at a point where little possibilities are left to further develop individuality, as the protagonist is sentenced to death. “By the story’s end, however,

Bigger had resolved his self-alienation by existentially creating a new identity for himself” (Fishburn 3). “But what I killed for, I am” (NS 453),

Bigger exclaims, and therein he accepts his responsibilities towards his deeds and their implications for the world around him. We can therefore agree with Harold Bloom, who asserts that although Bigger “is condemned to die as a violator of society’s laws, his death is really a final triumph over forces that have controlled his life since birth. While society fails to change in its attitude toward Bigger, ironically his attitude towards society is transformed” (124).

George Herbert Mead claims that feelings of inferiority and superiority are instinctive devices that support the establishment of the self

(cf. 204). In Bigger’s case, this ascendancy loses its negative connotations when he finds himself in prison: “When the sense of superiority goes over into a functional expression, then it becomes not only entirely legitimate, but it is the way in which the individuals do change the situations in which they live. … The superiority is not the end in view. It is a means for the

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 114 preservation of the self” (Mead 208). The portrayal of Bigger’s arrest supports this view, as “Wright symbolically presents Bigger in Messianic images, as a black Christ sacrificed for his race” (Fishburn 88). When he is caught, “two men stretched his arms out, as though about to crucify him”

(NS 301). The juxtaposition of the Christian cross as a means of consolation with the burning cross of the mob outside prison give further emphasis to the impression of Bigger as a martyr of whiteness. “Had he not taken fully upon himself the crime of being black? Had he not done the thing which they dreaded above all others?” (NS 326), Bigger reflects in his cell when he is confronted with his family and friends. Edward

Margolies compares Bigger Thomas to what Albert Camus perceives as the

“metaphysical revolutionary.” Truly, Bigger “challenges the very conditions of being — the needless suffering, the absurd contrast between his inborn sense of justice and the amorality and injustice of the external world. He tries to bring the world into accord with his sense of justice, but if this fails he will attempt to match in himself its injustice and chaos”

(1968, 82).

Consequently, Bigger is one step ahead not only of his contemporaries, but also of the protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s novel. In fact, Invisible Man wonders “whether accepting the lesson has placed me in the rear or in the avant-garde” (IM 572), and his plans to resurface from the underground show that he is still bound to society in order to know who he really is. In fact, “there’s a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play” (IM 581). Ralph Ellison declares that “it is only when the individual, whether white or black, rejects the pattern that

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 115 he awakens to the nightmare of his life. … For the penalty of wakefulness is to encounter ever more violence and horror than the sensibilities can sustain unless translated into some form of social action” (“Richard

Wright’s Blues” 92). Consequently, the telling of his story can be regarded as a first opportunity for Invisible Man to ease himself from his taunting vision of the world.

At this point, the narrative techniques in the novels are worth considering, for they enforce the disparity between Bigger and Invisible

Man. In fact, Wright’s novel draws upon a third-person narration with omniscience limited to Bigger’s perception of the world, whereas Invisible

Man “is the story of an internal quest — a journey of the soul” (Schafer

92), in which the protagonist speaks for himself. Therefore, the protagonists of Invisible Man and Native Son differ from each other in their expression. Bigger Thomas is inarticulate; other characters within the novel, most notably Boris Max, serve as his mouthpiece. Similarly, Bigger longs for the newspapers to “carry the story, his story. He felt that they had not wanted to print it as long as it had remained buried and burning in his own heart” (NS 252). However, the media prove to be what they are, a mere medium through which information is conveyed and which leave

Bigger no opportunity to speak for himself.

On the contrary, Invisible Man develops his rhetorical skills; “in seinem Sprachverhalten mausert sich der Protagonist von anfänglicher

Hilflosigkeit zu erstaunlicher Schlagfertigkeit” (Dietz 118). Keneth

Kinnamon claims that “Bigger repeatedly struggles to tell as well as understand his story, becoming in the process a bluesy modernist black

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 116 hero in a racist wasteland” (“Introduction” 26). In my opinion, this definition applies much better to Ellison’s protagonist, for it is through the writing of his memoirs that Invisible Man gains a sense of his identity, whereas Bigger’s “act of creation” occurs through violence. In Invisible

Man, the protagonist assumes the role of the artist, the creator of his world while in Native Son, as Nelson Algren puts it, “Bigger Thomas forced recognition by an act of violence, Wright by an act of art” (qtd. in Fishburn

60).

To Ralph Ellison, art “represents not only a special form of creation but also a realm of liberation” (Ostendorf 108). Through the writing of his

“autobiography,” Invisible Man is able to reconstruct the world to his own advantage, for “although he was unable to confront them in life, as author of the narrative he can deflate the images of those who ridiculed or deceived him by characterizing them as buffoons or villains” (Smith 49).

The protagonist’s first-person narration eases such vengeance upon his adversaries, for Invisible Man is our only source of information in the novel. The question of the narrator’s reliability comes up, for he himself admits that “when one is invisible he finds such problems as good and evil, honesty and dishonesty, of such shifting shapes that he confuses one with the other” (IM 572). However, as his narration is intended to enlighten invisibility and to show that “all dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price” (IM 14), the admission of his irresponsibility can be valued as a further device the narrator applies to gain confidence from and to induct his audience into the parallel universes of blackness and whiteness.

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 117

3.3. “Lower Frequencies”

Native Son and Invisible Man have had a significant impact on their audience and the literary world not only because of their artistic merits, but especially due to their depiction of black and white relations in the United

States. Richard Wright’s novel was a shocker when it was first published in

1940, so that “the writer most frequently credited with making the Negro

‘visible’ is Richard Wright” (Gross Avery 4). Invisible Man, first published in 1952, was nearly unanimously hailed as a masterpiece, as “one of the most finely crafted and innovative novels of the twentieth century”

(Sundquist 1).

Given their affiliation to the black minority, Richard Wright and

Ralph Ellison faced the problem of presenting the world from a universal perspective rather than the narrowed viewpoint of ethnicity. Such an enlarged approach was first of all necessary to render their work visible and credible to a black and white audience alike. J. Saunders Reddings asserts that “Negro writers have not believed that the white audience and the colored audience were essentially alike, because, in fact, they have not been essentially alike. They have been kept apart by a wide socio-cultural gulf, by differences of concept, by cultivated fears, ignorance, race- and caste consciousness. Now that gulf is closing, and Negro writers are finding it easier to appeal to the two audiences without being either false to the one or subservient to the other” (qtd. in Kumasi 35).

The personal reading as well as the critical evaluation of the two

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 118 novels suggests that Wright and Ellison succeeded in mending the gap between the black and the white world. Yet, their approaches to the topic as well as the resolution they present differ from each other. Native Son is written in the naturalistic tradition and is generally referred to as a social protest novel (cf. Baldwin, “Everybody’s Protest Novel”). Whereas he follows the literary traditions of his time and can thus be considered an epigone of white literary expression, Ralph Ellison is more experimental in his novel. The use of surrealistic and impressionistic techniques in Invisible

Man as well as its first-person narration can be valued as an important step out of the stencil of a black minority literature that is afflicted with negative connotations. Ralph Ellison‘s personal evaluation of Native Son proves this. To him “the limitations of Bigger Thomas were in part a consequence of the narrative form Wright elected to use, for the naturalistic mode, like the wrong channel, simply bypassed other frequencies of being, to which he wanted to give air time” (Schaub 134). Similarly, in his essay

“Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin censures Wright’s narration as “evanescent, titillating, remote, for this has nothing to do with us, it is safely ensconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it has nothing to do with anyone, so that finally we receive a very definite thrill from the fact that we are reading such a book at all” (18-19).

The differences in the field of narrative expression inevitably have an impact on the appeal of the novels. Whereas in Native Son “the white audience, on perceiving its responsibility for the plight of the protagonist, is expected to alter its attitude toward race” (Bone 1968, 158), Invisible

Man aims at the establishment of common ground between the black and

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 119 the white world. “Ellison has been forced to redefine the central issues of previous black literature so that the quest for ‘freedom’ no longer suggests a struggle for social equality but a search for existential self-discovery;

‘alienation,’ no longer a sense of racial isolation, but the refusal to accept self. … This shift was required not so much by Ellison‘s effort to portray a real black, as to find a bridge between the white and black worlds”

(Brennan 167). Within the novel, several efforts to “bridge” the black and white poles can be observed. Ellison’s nameless protagonist addresses his audience on several occasions: “Bear with me” (IM 14), he encourages us at the end of the prologue. In his last phrase, we are invited to reflect about his experiences not only in the contex of the novel, but also in relation to ourselves: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (IM 581). Berndt Ostendorf aptly observes that “the novel begins with I and ends with you; hence it fills the space of the and in between protagonist and reader; it provides the narrative linkage” (101). Through his autobiographical account, Invisible Man thus creates a pattern in which we as the readers are included. His anonymity, the lack of physical descriptions and emotional outbursts are further means that facilitate eventual identification with the protagonist, “so that the travails of the

American Negro reappear as a manifestation of a larger human condition, thus creating a common ground for white and black” (Brennan 168).

In Native Son, such “lower frequencies” are less obvious even though Richard Wright claims that “the history of the Negro in America is but the history of the western world writ small” (“A World View” 3). In fact, whereas “no American Negro exists who does not have his private

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 120

Bigger Thomas living in his skull” (Baldwin, “Many Thousands Gone”

133), the white audience is rather inclined to perceive the protagonist as a threat and his violent outburst as a criminal monstrosity against society.

However, the readership of the book can be seen as an extended courtroom that judges Bigger. While in the realistic depiction within the novel the protagonist’s fate is predestined, through its publication the narrowness which denies Bigger life is transcended. Samuel Sillen asserts that “the press reaction indicates that there is a correlation between the degree of a reviewer’s progressivism and the degree of his enthusiasm for the book”

(qtd. in Kumasi 8), and the same applies to the readers of the novel.

Richard Wright’s apparent attachment to racism as “ein gesellschaftliches Verhältnis” (Balibar, “Rassismus und Nationalismus”

54) as a main theme of the novel is a further hurdle that impedes identification. In fact, his black perspective reverses the categories of good and evil that have traditionally been a white monopoly. As a result, the white audience realises its share in the plight of the protagonist and is unpleasantly awakened to a new reality. At best, it comprehends that the

“treatment of the black has been such that he should respond aggressively even if he does not. This identification need not be conscious, of course; nevertheless, many whites do recognize that if they were exploited the way the blacks are, they would lash out aggressively” (Baughman 61). Mob action or open condemnation is at the other end of this scale of identification.

The apparent remoteness of the phenomenon of racism is another obstacle readers have to overcome in order to grasp the full meaning of

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 121

Native Son. If we suppose that “Bigger Thomas is more than black; he is every color of every race that knows injustice” (Lewis Chandler qtd. in

Kumasi 34), the protagonist can be dissociated from the symbolic sphere that embeds him and assume individual traits. It is then that Bigger is able

“to merge himself with others and be part of this world, to lose himself so he could find himself, to be allowed a chance to live like others, even though he was black” (NS 271).

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 122

4. Conclusion

The world’s law was no law for her mind. It was an age in which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider range than for many centuries before.

Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter

To the black minority in the United States, the search for identity is above all an examination of their position within the white world. Years of discrimination on a legal basis have contributed to the internalised conviction that a black skin is just what the scarlet badge is to Hester

Prynne, a symbol of inferiority and shame. Native Son and Invisible Man portray the mechanics these processes of whitewashing employ in order to substantiate white supremacy. Institutions operate from a white-centred perspective and, as a result, achievement is equated with whiteness. The acquisition of status symbols is used as bait in order to keep the black minority on the “right” way, that is the path of conformity and non- resistance to white power. Besides material goods, white women are status symbols of the uppermost importance. The tabooing of sexual relations between black men and white women is a prototypical example of the predominance and the impact of stereotypes. Within the two novels, women thus become foils to the protagonists, for they are robbed of their individuality as well.

The relationship between blacks and whites is dominated by this hierarchical frame. Besides open hostility and superiority, the novels present an array of characters that do at least try to look over the fence of appearances. They only partly succeed, for the classification into black and

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 123 white is still shown to be the animating principle that brings about encounters and thus renders individual features invisible. Consequently,

“Daltonism” is still in its beginnings, as with a few exceptions colour- blindness is revealed to be no more than a good intention. The protagonists in Wright’s and Ellison’s novels are not to be excluded from this phenomenon, for they face the world around them in the identical way. In

Invisible Man and especially in Native Son, blindness and invisibility are revealed to be connected phenomena that complement each other.

The world in which Bigger Thomas and Invisible Man live is a black microcosm that is embedded in the white world. It provides the protagonists with a measure of freedom to develop, for within the limits of the black world they enjoy relative autonomy and are subjected to a set of laws and conventions that ease adaptation to their actual condition of oppression and segregation. However, the squalor of their lives is unveiled first of all through their poverty and, more importantly, through their relations with each other. It was my intention to examine these affiliations with the help of the metaphor of motion in a static world. The result of this analysis is that Bigger and Invisible Man truly are “running Nigger boys,” yet their motion is aimless, and so are the actions of most of the other black characters within the novels. In fact, conduct is determined by the white environment; whereas the black characters believe to be active agents, they are revealed to be no more than puppets whose strings are in the hands of white forces. I have extended this condition of unconscious passivity into the metaphor of the world as a machine, in which blacks play a minor role as replaceable gearwheels. Such a vision of the world culminates in the

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 124 doctrine of the Communist Party, which both Richard Wright and Ralph

Ellison present as rational and objective organisations that lack humanity.

Yet, in Native Son the Communist Party comes off better for it does not overtly hinder Bigger Thomas in the execution of his individuality, but functions as a medium to unveil the mechanical horror of his life. On the contrary, Invisible Man faces a bunch of smug theoreticians in Brother

Jack and his comrades. However, in both novels we are presented with outstanding party members that contribute to the protagonists’ self- realisation and kindle the motorized party discipline to crumble.

Close contact with the white world provides occasions to initiate

Bigger Thomas and Invisible Man into their real condition of life. Bigger for the first time experiences his real essence when he comes into close contact with Mary Dalton and by accidentally smothering her fulfils the stereotypes he has been attributed all his life. In Invisible Man, at the factory hospital the protagonist undergoes a more complex initiation into his Afro-American existence that allows various interpretations. Yet, to both protagonists these events indicate the possibility to face the truth about their lives and to emancipate themselves from the expectations the world has put on them as “Niggers.” Bigger and Invisible Man consequently take their destiny into their hands and try to achieve a measure of freedom and individuality by playing a double-game that is based on the double consciousness they have freshly gained: Outwardly they conform, inwardly they not only question life, but try to shape and reconstruct the world in their own ways.

Both novels thus depict an interior development of their characters

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 125 that is triggered off by the outer world. Native Son and Invisible Man can therefore be labelled as Bildungsromane. In fact, Bigger and Invisible Man turn from pawns of the white world to manipulators of the black and white world alike. In their own way, both protagonists attempt to make the best out of their predicaments. That Bigger falls back on violence while

Ellison’s protagonist chooses art to express himself can be valued as a mirror of the progress not only black writers, but black individuals in general have undergone in the time span that lies in between the publication of the novels. The artistic finesse of Invisible Man supports this view, for it contrasts the direct and sometimes rude expression in Native

Son. Wright’s novel can be considered conventional in as far as literary aspects are concerned, Invisible Man is hailed as a masterpiece especially due to its formal characteristics. Ellison’s protagonist develops into a visionary that is able to write down his autobiographical account, Bigger is just spoken about and, moreover, is finally silenced through his execution.

This divergence in style has its effects on the reception of the books as well. In Invisible Man, various possibilities of identification are given not only due to narrative techniques, but mostly due to the novel’s focus on universal bonds between blacks and whites. While reading Native Son, I got the impression that Wright rather focuses on differences. Yet, close analysis reveals that universal traits can be found in Native Son as well; but they are more sublime and distorted by the revulsion Bigger’s murders cause. The impact of the revelation thus occurs even more powerfully, while Invisible Man still ponders about his future and leaves us time to reflect, Bigger truly forces us to recognise his humanity and our

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 126 inhumanity in relation to him. Wright’s novel thus develops into an enlarged courtroom, Invisible Man’s life is a work of art in our hands. Both novels serve as a medium to enlighten the invisibility of their protagonists.

I have tried to structure my thesis in a way that reflects the division of individuality into a public and a private person. George Herbert Mead’s conception of the “I” and the “me” as constituents of the self backs up my perception. In the course ofwriting my thesis, I have discovered that this separation can be extended and that basically life is composed of dualities.

The difference between black and white is the most obvious example, it relates to authority and alienation, activity and passivity, subjectivity and objectivity, me and you. Yet, the tie between these opposing poles is the animating principle behind my research: microcosms are placed within macrocosms, Bigger’s and Invisible Man’s tale, their stories, becomes history writ small. The first chapter was intended to reflect the history of racism, its implications were dealt with in the second part. The last chapter echoes the stony path blacks have had to walk to achieve freedom. The new paths Invisible Man and Bigger Thomas chose to tread suggest that individuality is a constant progress that evolves according to changing outer situations.

The question whether the protagonists in Wright’s and Ellison’s novels are native sons or invisible men allows no clear answer. In their portrayal, Bigger Thomas and Invisible Man are indeed native American citizens, yet they remain unseen for a long time. Their ethnic background is the major reason for this antithesis: they are perceived to be mere symbols and robbed of their individuality as a result of centuries of historical

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 127 whitewashing. Yet, their condition is expanded into universal dimensions.

Politics, capitalism, the dehumanisation in the machine age are further factors that contribute to the protagonists’ invisibility and, at the same time, to our own. The reading of Native Son and Invisible Man is thus a lesson about our own sense of perception and being perceived. The insight that nativity can also include invisibility becomes a peculiar experience given the fact that the protagonists of the novels themselves face the same dilemma. William James asserts that “no more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof” (“The Self”, 127-128). Bigger Thomas and Invisible Man achieve the opposite not only for themselves, but they also open up our eyes and truly make us see more clearly.

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5. An Adaptation of the Topic for the English Classroom 5.1 Preliminary remarks In the following section I would like to present a model of how the topic of the search for identity in Afro-American literature could be dealt with in the English classroom, more precisely in secondary school. After some preliminary remarks on the choice of Invisible Man as a primary text in the classroom, I would like to introduce the theoretical background to my lesson plans, which is the constructivist theory of learning. I will then present the objectives of the lessons I have planned as well as detailed lesson plans with additional explanations. I have decided to only include Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, first of all given the sheer volume of both novels, which would be impossible to handle in a couple of available lessons, but mostly because of the “lower frequencies” described in chapter 3.3 that are more tangible or, paradoxically, more visible in Invisible Man. Ellison himself writes that his “task was one of revealing the human universals hidden within the plight of one who was both black and American [and] to reveal the human complexity” (IM xxii).

This goal can be linked to educational aims as described in the general educational curriculum for the AHS in Austria8: the integrity, freedom and equality as well as dignity of human beings are at the core of education at school, especially related to humans at the margins of society. Furthermore, social disparities should be dealt with so that young learners are able to broaden their freedom of action and the range of perspectives of how lives can be lived (BMB Allg.).

Students in secondary school are at a crucial state in their development, as in puberty they turn into adults, that is self-determined

8 Hereafter referred to as BMB Allg.

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and, hopefully, self-confident beings who take their lives into their own hands. The protagonist of Invisible Man undergoes a similar development and, even though we can assume that he is already grown-up, can thus partly function as a role model, for the novel is about “his conscious struggle for self-definition and for an invulnerable support for his individual dignity” (IM xiv). Finally, the experimental narration of the novel offers more room for interpretation in contrast to the bleak naturalism of Native Son. Wright’s novel focuses on predestination; its protagonist is caught in a trap set by a society that, as James Baldwin comments, functions by “reducing human complexity to stereotype” (qtd. in NS xiii). In contrast, Ellison’s work ends on the high note that “there’s a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play” (IM 581). This is exactly what the curriculum requires, namely to raise awareness for the various forms of relations of individuals in various forms of communities as well as respect for different ways of giving purpose to one’s life (BMB Allg.).

5.2 Constructivist learning theory During my time at high school in Italy, I had the pleasure to deal with literature in German, Italian, English and French. I have always enjoyed reading, immersing myself in fictional works, going through adventures with protagonists or teaming up with antagonists. However, at school I noticed that my teachers had very different approaches to dealing with literature: In German and Italian we basically read novels, dramas and poems together and were then told what they mean. No room was given for our own interpretation and in exam situations we had to repeat what had been given to us as the only key to understanding these works of art. There was a clear distinction between teachers as “givers of knowledge” and students as passive recipients: “Teachers should talk and students should

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listen. Teachers should assign homework and students should do it. Teachers should give tests and assign grades and parents should accept the grades as good indicators of what a child is or is not learning. Teachers should tell parents what their children need to do, and parents should impose the teacher’s strategies on their children” (Hinchey 5). Luckily, this clearly behaviorist approach to teaching and learning, that is “the repetition of what gets reinforced, regardless of the acting subject’s understanding” (Glasersfeld 4), was replaced by an open approach to literature in English and French. Instead of studying facts in chronological order, we worked with texts that dealt with different topics that we could relate to, such as love, friendship or growing up. We were never given a “recipe” as to what texts mean, but encouraged to have a mind of our own instead. With a myriad of different methods in different settings, I remember these lessons as welcome opportunities to speak up and make connections to the real world. They gave me the possibility to dip my toes into social and political criticism and to see myself in the much larger frame of a society that is constantly evolving, just as I was and still am. Such a process of reflection can be linked to constructivism, as “from the constructivist perspective, learning is not a stimulus-response phenomenon. It requires self-regulation and the building of conceptual structures through reflection and abstraction” (Glasersfeld 14). As a teacher, I would like to give my students the opportunity to realize that they construct their perception of life and that they are active agents who can regulate their position, be it in the classroom, at work or in their leisure time. My experience in adult education and as a teacher at Waldorf School has shown me that interest and motivation are the basis for a successful understanding and learning. John Dewey, one of the fathers of constructivist theory, states that questions that are not directly related to life are not interesting. According to him, education and learning are not a

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matter of listening and speaking, but rather active processes (Landau 229- 231). This is why I would like to reduce my role in the process of teaching to that of a moderator whenever it is possible. Obviously, one cannot do without some instructions in the classroom, on the one hand because students may feel overwhelmed or disoriented otherwise, on the other because it is the role of the teacher to support them by opening up opportunities to reflect on their own perceptions and experiences with appropriate methods (BMB Allg.). As mentioned before, literature offers the possibility to achieve this goal, unless it is reduced to the learning of selected facts and sets of interpretations. A constructivist approach, however, excludes this standpoint with its focus on individual development, as it does not consider texts to have a specific meaning or message, but rather focuses on their interpretation: “Texts gain their meaning by the way they are juxtaposed with other texts. Thus, meaning is not ‘author determined’, but the product of intertextuality” (Gergen 22). This open approach widens the possibility to deal with different topics in different settings and it also enlarges the range of aims, which I will discuss in the following chapter.

5.3 Aims of the lessons The general curriculum considers the development of communicative competence as the main goal of school lessons in a foreign language (BMB Allg.). Thus, my lessons aim at offering students the possibility to further develop their abilities in the fields of speaking, reading, writing and listening alike in different settings. The focus is on practice and authenticity, in order to include and motivate all students as best as possible. A variety of methods and tasks builds the backbone of the lessons so that a positive learning atmosphere is created. As a consequence, students are supported, fostered and stipulated

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and can concentrate on their personal strengths, just as required in the general curriculum (BMB Allg.). American history starting in the 1960s is an integral part of the lessons as it is mirrored in Invisible Man. I prefer a thematic approach to a chronological treatise of facts, so that learners are not required to study details, but should rather construct their own system of knowledge (cf.

Roche 20). Through the inclusion of more current events as well as the biographies of pioneers in self-determination on an international scale, I would like to strengthen the learners’ inter- and transcultural understanding, which is also specified as a goal in the general curriculum (BMB Allg.). Furthermore, I would like to stimulate flexibility, individuality and creativity by including creative writing exercises that focus on self- expression as well as role plays that can eventually be turned into larger plays or even exhibitions through the use of cameras or their presentation in the form of a journal, according to the learners’ wishes and willingness. Such open methods are also suggested in the general curriculum (BMB Allg.) and can again be linked to constructivism, as “students are encouraged to examine matters of importance to them, to ask why things are the way they are, to analyze who benefits most from the status quo, and to explore possibilities for exchanging conditions they don’t like” (Hinchey 122-123). The methods I have selected to activate students in this quest are mostly suggested Reich as triggers of constructivist learning (cf. Reich 272-273). Finally and ideally, the lessons contribute to the students’ willingness to approach literature with pleasure, in that they aim at showing them that written texts are theirs to discover and explore.

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5.4 Lesson plans I would now like to present my lesson plans in tabular form, followed by explanations in text thereafter. The cycle of eight lessons is planned for senior classes, ideally at a Waldorf School within the framework of a so-called “epoché”. This means that English is the main subject and takes places every day in the first two lessons four days a week, so that this “epoché” revolving around Invisible Man and the topic of identity would last for one week. The single lessons have been designed in an indented way, which means that learners are given different tasks that build upon classroom activities. These tasks function as a cliffhanger and also as a preparation for the subsequent lessons. Given the difficulty of the topic, 12th grade at Waldorf School, that is 4th grade senior in a statal school, is the appropriate level.

Lesson I: Introduction

Time Content Social form Material “I am many – who am I?” Individual work 7’ Teacher writes down his name on the blackboard, encircles it, and writes down further examples of his shifting identities around it (e.g. “teacher”, “brother”, “tax- payer”) and asks students to do the same for themselves. As a help, students may be instructed to think of themselves in the chronological order of a day (e.g. “passenger”, “commuter”, “student”). Individual results are collected 15’ on the blackboard, students are Whole class encouraged to write their findings on the blackboard,

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where the name of the teacher is substituted with “ME”. Findings can be aligned according to importance into “Core-Me” and “Other-Me”. This is followed by a short reflection on shifting identities, eventually also by a division into roles that are pleasant or can be awkward by underlining them with different colors. Quick revision of the second Whole Paper strips 10’ conditional (examples on the class/individual (App.1) blackboard) with creative writing task follow-up. Presentation of requirements Portfolio 13’ for the portfolio Whole class requirements (App.2)

The first lesson I have drafted aims at introducing the concept of identity to the learners. By reflecting about the different roles they assume in their lives, interest in the topic is established, as “to solve a problem intelligently, one must first see it as one’s own problem” (Glasersfeld, von 14). The collection of different roles together may strengthen community, as learners get insights into other perspectives and may come across concepts of identity that they have not thought about before. By getting to know about other roles, also imagination and empathy are strengthened, as

“meaning is achieved through the coordinated efforts of two or more persons” (Gergen 24). The subsequent revision of the second conditional is intended to reinforce this, as it gives learners the possibility to walk in shoes they have not worn yet. For homework, they should write a short hypothetical text about a certain role that is assigned to them randomly by drawing from a set that I have prepared (App. 1). Finally, the rest of the first lesson is used to discuss the assignments for the portfolio (App.2). I have chosen this method of assessment as it enables learners to regulate and present their learning outcomes in an individual way, so that the learners are “didacts of their own learning” (Reich 210).

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Lesson II: Invisibility

Time Content Social form Material If I were invisible, I Team Work Prepared 10’ would/could/should/might… sheets of paper Placemat-method: In groups of with the four, learners get a sheet of placemat- paper in which everybody is layout assigned space to write. (App. 3) Working silently, they start off by writing about being invisible. After 2 minutes, the sheet is turned so that everybody gets to read what another team member has written down. Consequently, their written thoughts are developed further by adding comments, posing questions or continuing their narration. The sheet is turned another two times until everybody gets back to their initial text. Finally, the groups discuss their reflections and decide on a central statement that is written down in the middle of their sheet. The groups briefly present their 4’ outcomes, the placemat sheets Whole class are put together, eventually they can be hung on the wall Text reading: The class is divided Individual Copied texts 20’ into two groups, each of which is work, (App. 4) given a text. It should be read eventually, and the most important facts learners can should be highlighted so that also work in everybody is able to summarize small teams the most important facts orally so that they afterwards. can support each other in the reading process.

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Oral summary: Tandems are 6’ formed consisting of partners Team work with different texts, so that everybody tells somebody else about the most important facts in their text. Conclusion: In how far were 5’ Rosa Parks and Martin Luther Whole class King invisible? How did they get visible? Homework assignment: Personal letter to either Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King.

In the second lesson, I would like to introduce the concept of invisibility. Again, the focus lies on the learners’ imagination instead of an active teacher’s role, as “teachers have to refrain themselves so that they do not only fulfil one role as mediators of knowledge. This would lead to passive learners who are reduced to reconstructing knowledge. They have a double role at least: on the one hand they are experts in the subjects they teach, and at the same time they are hosts in the construction of knowledge and actions in the classroom” (Reich 205). The first exercise in this session is linked to the first lesson in that it functions as a negative to the previous assembling of different roles. Depending on the degree of reflection of the learners, this exercise may be difficult. In this case a short prompt may trigger them; for example, I could hide myself and subsequently quickly ask for their impression about it or tell them a brief account of a situation in which I felt invisible, e.g. as a cyclist in the morning traffic. The placemat- method is ideal for gathering individual perceptions or ideas in that it offers participants a safe opportunity to express themselves in small groups and the chance to learn from others. In fact, it is essentially constructivist, as “constructivist learning is made up by three roles: being an agent, a participant and an observer” (Reich 229). The following step, the reading and summarizing of two texts, has two intentions: On the one hand, it is obviously meant to train individual

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reading and comprehension skills as well as to give learners the possibility to talk. On the other, the choice of two pioneers of the Civil Rights Movement is also intended to prepare them for the work on Invisible Man. As a written production for the portfolio, learners are invited to write a personal letter to one of the two activists. Given the high grade, I refrain from repeating the basics of this text format.

Lesson III: Identity

Time Content Social form Material I am unique because… Individual Strips of paper 3’ Learners finish this sentence on work with the their own. Teacher collects beginning of strips of paper. the sentence (App.5) Brainstorming: What constitutes Individual 12’ one’s identity? work/team Learners write their ideas on a work sheet of paper, after 6 minutes they team up with a partner and order their ideas in a mind map. To ease this task, I draw a mind map with the following umbrella terms on the blackboard: BODY, SOCIAL LIFE, VALUES, OTHER. Mind map is completed on the Team work 10’ blackboard by using learners’ findings. These are written down by the teacher and briefly reflected upon together. Learners are given a picture of a Individual Copies of the 12’ book cover and are asked to work book covers write a short blurb about the without title story they imagine behind it. (App.6) After 4 minutes, the pictures are handed on. This is done another two times so that everybody has got three pictures and accordingly three blurbs. Some of the blurbs are read 6’ aloud, grouped according to the Whole class

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pictures. The covers are revealed to be of 2’ the same book, namely Invisible Whole class Man – short follow-up discussion about the different graphic depictions on the cover

In the third lesson, my first aim is to narrow down the various ideas about one’s position in society to a concept of identity as a shifting and changing process. As a starter, I again resort to the students’ observations and experiences by asking them to think about features or experiences that make them unique. Writing them down anonymously on strips of paper, also shy students get the chance to express themselves unbashfully. Furthermore, the written production will be used as a starter in the follow- up lesson. This exercise is followed by a quick brainstorming that leads to mind mapping. Instead of having abstract concepts of identity presented by the teacher, learners are encouraged to think of their own definition of the concept. Mind mapping is an ideal method to bring one’s ideas to paper and to structure them efficiently. By first working alone, then in groups of two and finally as the whole class, individual ideas are again set in a larger context by pairing up and then sharing findings in class. In this way, learners again work on the basis of what they know themselves and learn to present and organize their ideas, so that the teacher is “concerned with what goes on in the student’s head. The teacher must listen to the student, interpret what the student does and says, and try to build up a “model” of the student’s conceptual structures” (Glasersfeld, von 14). This model is completed by generating the “final” mind map together on the blackboard. The second part of the lesson is meant as an introduction to

Invisible Man and literature as an intersubjective art. Students are given pictures of book covers without being told they are all of Invisible Man. They are invited to imagine the story behind the pictures in written form as

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short blurbs and to give “their novels” a title. In this way, different stories are collected, imagination and creativity are ideally triggered to be then revealed as the outcome of individual perceptions. This exercise and the short reflection following the revelation that the pictures are from the same book is meant to “give up the requirement that knowledge represents an independent world, and admit instead that knowledge represents something that is far more important to us, namely what we can do in our experiential world […]” (Glasersfeld 6-7).

Lesson IV: Invisible Man

Time Content Social Material

form “I am unique” – the Whole Copies of the text I have 4’ individual sentences class arranged on the basis of arranged to an individual responses from anaphoric text are read the previous lesson together, followed by time for reflection and comments. The concept of “being Individual Gapped song text (App.7) 6’ blue” is briefly work discussed before learners are invited to fill in the gaps of the lyrics. Volunteers read out their own “blues”. Listening Whole Song 4’ comprehension: “What class (https://www.youtube.co Did I Do to Be so Black m/watch?v=- and Blue?” by Louis vDm1lomVHU) Armstrong. Learners write down the original lyrics, which are then briefly discussed. Extracts from the Whole Copies of the extracts 20’ prologue of Invisible class from the prologue (App.8)

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Man are read together in class. Learners are invited to highlight three passages in the text that surprise or dishevel them. Learners are asked to Individual Prepared colored slips of 5’ write a Tweet about work paper one of the passages from the prologue on slips of paper. The tweets are collected by the teacher and then handed out randomly, students write another Tweet as a response. The Tweets are then pinned to a wall so that they can be read individually. Students are given the Whole Slips of paper with 6’ following quote by class quotation (App.9) William James on a slip of paper: “No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof.” Ideas about being invisible in daily life are collected; learners should research individual stories about “invisible people” online as a homework.

The fourth lesson again ties in with the learners’ individual experiences and perceptions by them presenting their observations about uniqueness in the form of an anaphoric text that I have compiled with their

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answers from the previous lesson. This starter is juxtaposed with the following step, in which the common experience of being blue is discussed. Eventually, this will also be linked to the musical genre of the Blues. The learners are then handed Louis Armstrong’s lyrics of “What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue?” and encouraged to fill the gaps individually. Examples are then read out aloud. This exercise is meant to be creative and to boost learners’ self-consciousness in writing, as ideally they create their own blues. I think it especially interesting to see which adjective they pick in the refrain instead of Armstrong’s “Black”. The song is then listened to once and the gaps are filled with the correct lyrics. Besides being pleasant to listen to and giving students the opportunity to lean back, the song also functions as a bridge to the subsequent reading of the prologue, in which the protagonist of Invisible

Man states that “perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible” (IM 8). At this point, the main focus is on reading parts of the prologue of Invisible Man. I have planned 20 minutes for the relatively short extract as it is quite complex and may need further explanations. Additionally, everybody should get the chance to read, and as reading speeds vary, more time may be needed. In order to give learners the chance to find their own approach to the themes presented in the prologue, they get the option to highlight three passages, incidents or statements. After reading, they should translate one of them into a short Tweet which is then redistributed to a random recipient who in turn answers briefly. Instead of struggling with difficult theoretical concepts, in this way “meaning is achieved through the coordinated efforts of two or more persons” (Gergen 24). I also think that by the subsequent (voluntary) reading of the pinned-up Tweets, learners may get a good impression that the prologue of the novel has sparked a wide range of reactions so that the whole class reflects about their diversity

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rather than focusing on details. In the final part of this lesson, the fact of being invisible because of others’ (missing) perceptions as presented in the prologue is widened with the use of a quote by William James. A brief discussion about being unseen as an individual in society follows and ensures that learners are able to do online research at home about stories of people whose stories have been unheard or overlooked. The aim of this research is to be able to recount the incidents that have been found online, which means that besides basic facts (name, time and place of the incident) no detailed knowledge apart from the concrete occurrence is needed in the following lesson. Lesson V: Discrimination

Time Content Social form Material Students are paired randomly. Pair work 10’ They should tell each other about the findings of the online research and decide on one of the two stories. Then they should develop a short role play (1-2 minutes) focusing on the incident to act it out in front of the class. Role plays are presented to the 20’ class by the teams. Different Whole class forms of discrimination occurring therein are discussed and summarized on the blackboard by the teacher. History of the Civil Rights Pair work Cut slips of 7’ Movement in a nutshell. Learners paper from are given historical facts on cut the timeline out slips of paper. They should (App.10) arrange them correctly according to the dates that I write on the blackboard. Correction together with Whole class 7’ additional brief explanations by the teacher. Homework assignment: Learners Whole class 1’ are asked to read the first chapter

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of Invisible Man

The fifth lesson is meant to deal with discrimination and individual strategies to overcome suppression. For this purpose, it is necessary to recognize discrimination as such, which is why the lesson starts off with role plays about the topic. The role plays, followed by short discussions, should provide an arena in which problems can be named as such and solutions can be found together, so that “the student’s role shifts from object to be operated on to subject within relationships” (Gergen 34). In the second part of the lesson, solutions to discrimination are presented in dealing with an overview of the Civil Rights Movement. By assigning facts thereof that are presented on slips of paper to dates written on the blackboard, students get the chance to construct history resorting to facts already dealt with in class or heard of before. According to how well they fare, parts of the history may be repeated or additional facts may be presented by the teacher. Finally, the students get a reading task for homework in that they should read the first chapter of Invisible Man.

Lesson VI: Nightmares and dreams

Time Content Social form Material Structured Talk: Students Group work Role cards and tasks 16’ are assembled in groups (App.11) of four and given different roles and tasks to discuss the first chapter of Invisible Man. They take notes of their findings. Findings are presented to Whole class 7’ the class. “I Have a Dream”: Individual Copies of the speech 18’ Students are given the work (App.12) copied text of Martin Audio of the speech Luther King’s speech. They (from:

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should read along while https://www.youtub listening and do the e.com/watch?v=vP4i following tasks that the Y1TtS3s), colored teacher writes on the A4-sheets blackboard: - Highlight rhetorical features that strike you (similes, metaphors, anaphors…) - Choose your favorite line or phrase. - Summarize Martin Luther’s dream by compiling an acrostic that contains the word DREAM on colored A4-sheets Some of the DREAM- Whole class 4’ acrostics are presented; all of them are pinned to the wall

The sixth lesson starts by applying the method “structured talk”: students are paired up in teams of four and are assigned a role randomly. I have picked three from the first chapter in Invisible Man and added the one of the hypothetical black spectator at the battle scene. Students are expected to work on the content of the first chapter through the eyes of the role they draw. Given that this is a difficult task, questions are included which they should answer as well as roles for all participants while one of them is speaking so that they are not mere listeners, but engage in a conversation (see App. 12). Through the possibility of analysing the battle scene from different perspectives, they should get to the conclusion that discrimination works on various levels and that the roles of offender and victim shift according to circumstances. Additionally, this method again gives students the possibility to draw conclusions from their own perceptions and observations in line with constructivism, where

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“knowledgeable and rational statements are not external expressions of the internal mind, but are integers in the ongoing flow of communication” (Gergen 33). The second part of the lesson functions as antipode to the nightmarish scenes in Ellison’s novel, as it deals with Martin Luther King’s famous speech, his dreams, that is ways of terminating oppression and segregation. Given its linguistic richness, I would like to use the opportunity to review stylistic devices assuming that they have been studied before, a task which is done individually. Secondly, I would like to give learners the possibility to extract the main points of the speech by simply using an acrostic in which they insert five terms to summarize what makes up Martin Luther King’s dream. The key phrase they are asked to highlight is needed for portfolio work at home.

Lesson VII: Two different approaches

Time Content Social form Material Malcolm X listening Whole class Answer sheet (app. 12’ comprehension 14) and video on https://www.youtub e.com/watch?v=Hj8 dO5ytfKI Students are handed a list Individual List with quotes 1o’ with quotes from Malcolm work (App. 13) X and Martin Luther King, they should cut them out and rank them. Rankings are compared, Whole class 8’ quotes are attributed to either Martin Luther King or Malcolm X Students are asked to Whole class 15’ position themselves in the room on a line so that their affiliation to one of the two concepts I

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mention becomes visible and can be briefly discussed: - Martin Luther King vs Malcolm X - Integration vs Segregation - Black vs White - Self vs society - Demonstration vs Sit-in - Us vs Them - Unity vs Diversity

The seventh lesson has Malcolm X at its center as an important personality that differs from Martin Luther King despite pursuing the same goals. In order for the students to get to know Malcolm X, I write his name on the blackboard and ask for an explanation for the surname “X”. This is followed by a listening comprehension that summarizes the most important stages in Malcolm X’s life. There are prepared questions for this task and in order to fulfill it, I think it may be necessary to watch the video twice. The answers are discussed together before the attention is then turned towards the dissimilarities between King and X by ranking sentences from both leaders according to the personal relevance they attribute to their quotations without knowing who they are from. The citations cover topics from identity to self-reliance up to resistance and it should be easy for the students to at least sort out those they like best and least. After that, they can eventually be asked to stand up and form groups according to the quote they have picked. They can then be asked randomly to comment on their choice und to substantiate it with concrete examples or to guess whether they are from King or X. In a final step, I would like students to position themselves according to two opposing concepts by forming a diagonal in the room. In this way, they are activated physically and can be asked for further explanation, which is their personal standpoint, by just being picked

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according to where they stand. Some of the terms are abstract and it may be difficult to grasp, but by working together and discussing them, new perspectives will open up showing that students are always constructors of their knowledge (cf. Reich 209).

Lesson VIII: Lower Frequencies

Time Content Social form Material Summary of Invisible Man Frontal Keywords of the plot 12’ teaching on moderation cards (App.15) Reading of the epilogue of Whole class 18’ Invisible Man

“Lower frequencies” Individual 15’ work/team work/whole class

The eighth and final lesson I have planned is meant to round off the topic “identity”. The epilogue of Invisible Man provides the ideal resource for this purpose as it addresses topics that are related to one’s search for identity in a universal way. Given the sheer length of the entire novel, I have renounced reading it entirely, focusing on its beginning and ending instead, which is why I would like to summarize the main events of its plot at this stage. This should awake students’ interest in reading the whole novel as well as enable them to see connections between the topics we have dealt with and the novel itself. I would like to summarize the novel by using moderation cards that I have prepared in advance and by re-telling the main events that unfold around the relative stages in the novel. This way, students are also acquainted with events presented in the epilogue that we have not read. The epilogue itself should function as a trigger for the “lower

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 148

frequencies” that are common to the human condition and the construction of one’s identity. While reading together, students should highlight at least five words or phrases that appeal to them as a basis for further work. Following the reading itself, everybody should cluster their selected topics in freely associating other ideas to them in a cluster. Individual findings are then compared in teams.

In a final part, quotations from the novel are briefly discussed together (App. 15); students may take notes of different ideas as they have to write a short reflection on one of them for their portfolio.

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 149

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Wright, Richard. Native Son. London: Vintage, 2000.

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Baker, Houston A., Jr. “Richard Wright and the Dynamics of Place in Afro- American Literature.” New Essays on Native Son. Ed. Keneth Kinnamon. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 85-116.

Baldwin, James. “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” Notes of a Native Son. Clinton: Colonial Press, 1964. 13-22.

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Fremon, David K. The Jim Crow Laws and Racism in American History. Berkeley Heights, New Jersey: Enslow Publishers, 2000.

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Appendix Appendix 1: If I were….

If I were chancellor of Austria…

If I were rich beyond my wildest dreams…

If I were to rule the world…

If I had wings…

If I won the lottery…

If I were a famous rock star…

If I were on the Moon…

If I had three wishes…

If I lived in…

If I were God…

Appendix 2: Portfolio requirements You are invited to hand in your portfolio one week after the last lesson on the topic of “identity”. It should consist of the following parts: - Cover: Includes your name, the title “identity” and a creative image. This can be a mind map from class, but also a picture you draw, a collage, a word web, etc.

- Personal letter to your teacher: Briefly introduce the main contents of the lessons and give a brief outline of the contents of your portfolio. - Daily learning journal: Briefly summarize every lesson and explain what you have (not) learned, discuss one or two aspects (this can be contents, methods used in class, texts, etc.) that you find worth mentioning or write about a thought of yours that has been triggered or an observation in daily life that is related to the lesson.

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 157

- Core tasks: 1. The personal letter to either Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King (app. 250 words) 2. Film review of one of the following films (app. 250 words): - Queen & Slim (Leokino) - 12 Years a Slave (DVD)

- Malcolm X (DVD) DVDs can be borrowed from me! 3. Reflection on the quote by William James related to your research work on somebody who has been “invisible” in a particular situation in society (app. 150 words). - Selectable tasks: Select four pieces of work that you choose from the exercises done in class, edit them if necessary and briefly state why you have picked them in a couple of sentences. These exercises include: - If I were invisible,… - I am many, who am I? - Blurbs - Mind maps - Clusters

- Reflection on your phrase from “I Have a Dream” speech - Your own “blues” - Feedback hand: Draw the putline of one of your hands.Your thumb should contain what you liked about the lessons, on your index finger you write down what could have been done better (by yourself, the teacher, the class). The middle finger stands for what you did not like, on the ring finger you write down what is the main insight you have won in the lessons. Finally, on your little finger you take note of what you would have liked to get to know more about. Your portfolio is marked according to the following criteria:

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 158

Completeness: 5 points Language: 5 points Layout and presentation: 5 Points Creativity and individuality: 5 points

Appendix 3: Placemat

Appendix 4: Texts USA - American life The story of Rosa Parks How one young lady's defiance helped ignite the whole American Civil rights movement in the 1950s

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 159

Rosa Parks, with Martin Luther King and a bus (left) and receiving a medal from Gov. Siegelman in 2000 (right) Society goes forward more thanks to people who refuse authority, than to those who respect it. While some people might consider this idea as a recipe for anarchy, it is an idea that is highly respected in the culture of the English-speaking countries. It is rooted in a historic tradition of tolerance, and expressed in attitudes to difference, to originality, even to eccentricity. It does not mean that English speaking countries have always been tolerant: that is certainly not the case; but those who react against intolerance or just against senseless authority can easily become heroes. Rosa Parks is a classic example. As a young woman in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, in the Deep South of the United States, Rosa became a heroine and role model for millions because she defied authority. Traveling home on a Montgomery bus one day in 1955, Rosa had the gall to sit down in one of the empty seats at the front, seats reserved for Whites only. When the driver noticed, he immediately stopped the bus, and ordered Rosa to go to the back of the bus. Rosa defied his authority. The driver repeated his order "Go to the back!" Again, and again Rosa defied him; in the end, the police were called, and Rosa Parks was hauled off the bus and arrested. She was fined $10 - a large sum in those days. Yet Rosa's defiance of authority was to have repercussions throughout the USA; it was this act that ignited the whole Civil Rights movement in the United States of America, and gave hope to similar movements in other parts of the world. As Rosa faced down authority on that city over half a century ago, little did she imagine that she would one day receive the highest honor of the State of Alabama, and that that honor would be bestowed on her personally by the Governor. Yet that is exactly what has happened. At the end of the year 2000, Rosa Parks, then an elderly lady, became the first recipient of the "Governor's Medal of Honor for Extraordinary Courage", a new award designed to honor those who demonstrate extraordinary acts of courage that have a lasting impact on the lives of others. At the presentation ceremony, Governor Siegelman said: "As governor, I am proud to bestow this highest honor on Rosa Parks, a woman who, in 1955, stared down injustice by sitting firmly to take a stand against the inequality of that day. Mrs. Parks' simple act of civil disobedience sparked

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 160 a global revolution that began with the Montgomery Bus Boycott and forever changed our nation. Every American is indebted to this daughter of Alabama, who refused to bow to injustice and who personifies extraordinary heroism. May her profound courage and tenacious will for social justice our hearts and forever inspire us all. "I can think of no one who has demonstrated more individual courage or a willingness to stand up for what is right than Mrs. Parks, and I am proud to name her as the first recipient of this award." Though Blacks and Whites had, in theory, been equal citizens in the USA since the days of emancipation, even in 1950 they did not benefit from equal rights. Segregation was particularly severe in the states of the Old South, those states that had fought a civil war in defense of slavery less than 100 years previously. In Alabama, things were as bad as anywhere. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme court had ruled that "separate but equal" education policies were illegal, but little had been done in the southern states to change the situation. Yet Blacks - "Negroes" as they were called in those days - were becoming more determined to challenge White power. The famous "Montgomery Bus Boycott", triggered by Rosa's act of defiance, lasted for almost a year. In defense of equal rights, Montgomery's whole black population - representing the majority of bus travelers - boycotted public transport, and by so doing demonstrated, in the heart of Alabama, that Blacks were a fundamental part of local society. Without black passengers, the white-owned and run bus company got into serious financial difficulty, and had to reduce services, causing problems for the remaining white passengers and job losses for white employees. In December 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that Alabama's segregation laws were unconstitutional; and another big fight in the struggle for Civil Rights had been won. A few days later, a young black minister, the Reverend Martin Luther King, sat just where Rosa had sat a year earlier in a Montgomery bus, and no one told him to move. The long struggle for Civil Rights was not over, but a major battle had been won. WORDS: award: honor, prize - bestow on: give to - bow to: submit to - to boycott: refuse to use something - defy (pronounced [di'fai]): resist – distrust: questioning, suspicion - emancipation: liberation, the end of slavery - gall: impudence, boldness - hauled: pulled - minister: churchman - run: managed - spark: ignite, set light to - stare down: confront - trigger: start - will: determination

Source: https://linguapress.com/advanced/rosa-parks.htm

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 161

USA - American life

Who killed Martin Luther King?

On the night of April 4th 1968, someone was waiting opposite the windows of the Lorraine Motel, in downtown Memphis. In front of the motel, a big white Cadillac was parked; it was the car in which the Rev. Martin Luther King was being driven round, as he traveled through the southern states, speaking to audiences in towns and cities, promoting the cause of non-violence and civil rights.

When King stepped out onto the balcony, to take a breath of fresh air after eating his dinner, a shot rang out. The civil rights leader and Nobel-prizewinner, the man who preached non-violence, fell to the ground, fatally wounded. Within minutes, he was dead.

The news spread like wildfire round the USA; the man who had done more, perhaps, than any other to further the rights of Black people in the United States of America, had been assassinated, it seemed, by a lone sniper, a white extremist. Weeks later a man by the name of James Earl Ray was arrested and sentenced to 99 years in prison for the assassination. But is that really what happened?

Though James Earl Ray initially confessed to killing King, it was not long before he retracted his statement; and to this day, there are those who do not believe that Ray was actually guilty of the crime for which he spent almost 30 years behind bars.

Indeed, the calls for Ray's release grew stronger by the year, to the point that even Dexter King, Martin Luther King's son, now believes that Ray was not his father's assassin.

But if Ray did not do the deed, who did? And why? Was it just a pure racist crime? Or was this a political assassination ordered by some faceless figures in some secret service? The theory that King was really assassinated by the Secret Service has been growing more and more popular over recent years, and was even the subject of an "X-Files" episode. So how real is the conspiracy theory? And what reasons might anyone other than a racist have had to get rid of a charismatic and peaceful leader like Martin Luther King?

We have to take ourselves back to 1968. Since 1955, King had been at the front of the Civil Rights movement in the USA. He had given great support to the year-long bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, which eventually led to the desegregation of public transportation; he had used his skills as a passionate orator to inspire black people to stand up for their rights, in housing, education and other civil rights; and he had gained the backing of a growing number of whites. He was in the front line of the anti-segregation demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, which

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 162 probably did more than any other protest to further the cause of civil rights.

During his brief presidency from 1960 to 1963, Kennedy paved the way for a Civil Rights Act, which would officially ban race-based segregation throughout the USA. Though Kennedy was gunned down before he had time to put the act through Congress, Lyndon Johnson completed the job, and by the end of 1964, the Civil Rights Act was law, and Martin Luther King had won the Nobel Prize for Peace.

Racism, however, had not disappeared. More laws, including the 1968 Civil Rights Act, were needed to fully eradicate all forms of official racism. But even then, laws could not change the deep-seated bigotry of many southern whites; the more Civil Rights laws were passed, the more some racist groups felt threatened.

1968 was a crisis year in many countries. The Civil Rights movement in the USA had more or less merged with the anti-Vietnam War movement. Black leaders like King were being joined by the pacifist gurus of a new generation of educated young white Americans, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. At the same time, in the black ghettoes of the rustbelt cities, a new and more aggressive movement had emerged: Black Power.

In the opinion of some observers, America was slowly sliding towards civil unrest on a large scale. Though King, with his non-violence, was no supporter of civil conflict, he was the no.1 figurehead of black America. Hence the conspiracy theory.

According to the theory, King was assassinated by the government (whoever that may have been) to prevent the USA from severe civil conflict. A week before King was assassinated, a peaceful march in Memphis had been provoked into violence by a gang called "the Invaders". Nobody knows who was behind the Invaders - but someone was.

James Earl Ray admitted that he was involved in the assassination of King, but claimed that he was part of a plot, the dumb guy who was used by others who tricked him into it. He claimed that the gun that killed King was actually fired by a man called "Raoul" - but who Raoul was no one knows. Dexter King, who has studied events surrounding his father's death in the minutest detail, now believes that Ray was telling the truth.

In July 1997, a judge in Memphis announced that new scientific tests suggest that it was not Ray's gun that fired the bullet that killed King.

So if it was "Raoul", not Ray, that really assassinated Martin Luther King, why did he do it, and on whose orders? Was it the CIA, or some other secret organization, nervous about rising black militantism and opposition to the Vietnam war? Or was King's assassination masterminded by some secret white supremacist organisation?

Maybe we will know one day, maybe not.

WORDS: shot: gunshot, sound of a gun being shot - retracted: withdrew, denied, took back - release: liberation, freedom - get rid of: eliminate, kill -

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 163 backing: support, help - act: law - eradicate : eliminate, remove - bigotry: narrow-mindedness, people with narrow and fixed ideas, extremism - rustbelt: The Rustbelt is the part of the USA (from Chicago to Virginia) where old fashioned heavy industries have gone into decline

Source: https://linguapress.com/advanced/martin-luther-king.htm

Appendix 5: I am unique because

I am unique because…

I am unique because…

I am unique because…

I am unique because…

I am unique because…

I am unique because…

I am unique because…

I am unique because…

I am unique because…

I am unique because…

Appendix 6: Book covers

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 164

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 165

Source: https://www.google.com/search?q=invisible+man+book+cover+ellison&tbm=isch&ved=2 ahUKEwieyOzk5_vmAhWPO1AKHWY5ANsQ2- cCegQIABAA&oq=invisible+man+book+cover+ellison&gs_l=img.3..0i8i30.32261.3363 1..34765...0.0..0.270.1218.0j6j2...... 0....1..gws-wiz- img...... 0i19j0i30i19.w4cVKRyMaoY&ei=x- IZXt7ICI_3wALm8oDYDQ&bih=565&biw=1280&client=firefox-b- d#imgrc=FleiXHq1oRhupM

Appendix 7: “What Did I Do to Be so ______and Blue?” by Louis Armstrong Old empty _____, springs hard as _____ Feel like old______, wish I was ______What did I do to be so ______and blue?

Even the ______ran from my ______They ______at you and ______you too What did I do to be so ______and blue?

I'm ______inside, but that don't help my case 'Cause I can't ______what is in my face How will it end? Ain't got a ______

My only sin is in my ______What did I do to be so ______and blue?

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 166

Source: https://genius.com/Louis-armstrong-what-did-i-do-to-be-soblack-and-blue-lyrics

Appendix 8: Quote by William James

“No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and

remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof.” William James

Appendix 9: Timeline of the Civil Rights Movement

1865 13th Amendment: End of slavery as legal institution in the United States 1870 Blacks are given the right to vote through the 15th amendment End of the Introduction of Jim Crow laws 19th century 1896 Supreme Court decision: facilities can be “separate but equal” 1941 Executive order by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Defense jobs and other government jobs became available to all Americans regardless of race, creed, color or national origin. 1955 Rosa Parks starts the Montgomery Bus Boycott 1957 “Little Rock Nine”: Nine black students tried to attend Central High School in Little Rock in Arkansas following the Supreme Court ruling that segregated education was unconstitutional. They were met by a mob and had to be protected, but still were not able to attend classes. 1960 Greensboro sit ins. Black students refused to leave Woolworth’s lunch counter without being served in Greensboro, North Carolina. They were joined by hundreds and triggered other non-violent sit-ins and demonstrations. 1963 March on Washington with over 200.000 people hearing Martin Luther King’s famous speech 1964 Civil Rights Act initiated by President Kennedy is signed by his successor Lyndon B. Johnson 1965 Malcolm X is killed 1968 Martin Luther King is killed 1968 Fair Housing Act is passed, preventing housing

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discrimination Today

Appendix 10: Role cards and tasks

Protagonist White spectator How do you feel during the battle? Why are you at the event? What do you think of your fellow Why don’t you feel the pain and combatants? humiliation of the combatants? How would you get out of this Which alternatives of situation? entertainment could you find for yourself? White dancer Alleged black spectator How do you feel as only woman Which feelings would you have at surrounded by gazing men? the sight of the battle? What’s the difference between the How would you behave, black and white spectators? surrounded by other white How do you get out from the spectators? scene? What could be a possible way out for you?

Speaker Writer Investigator Summarizer Answer the Write down Ask the speaker Try to questions on keywords. for further summarize what your role card. details or the speaker says examples. in one sentence.

Appendix 11: “I Have a Dream”

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. [applause]

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves [Audience:] (Yeah) who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 168 captivity. (Hmm)

But one hundred years later (All right), the Negro still is not free. (My Lord, Yeah) One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. (Hmm) One hundred years later (All right), the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later (My Lord) [applause], the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. (Yes, yes) And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence (Yeah), they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men (My Lord), would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. (My Lord) Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds. [enthusiastic applause] (My Lord, Lead on, Speech, speech)

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. (My Lord) [laughter] (No, no) We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. (Sure enough) And so we’ve come to cash this check (Yes), a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom (Yes) and the security of justice. (Yes Lord) [enthusiastic applause]

We have also come to this hallowed spot (My Lord) to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. (Mhm) This is no time (My Lord) to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. [applause] (Yes, Speak on it!) Now is the time (Yes it is) to make real the promises of democracy. (My Lord) Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time [applause] to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 169 injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time (Yes) [applause] (Now) to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent (Yes) will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. (My Lord) 1963 is not an end, but a beginning. (Yes) And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. [enthusiastic applause] There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: in the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. (My Lord, No, no, no, no) [applause] We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. (My Lord) Again and again (No, no), we must rise to the majestic heights (Yes) of meeting physical force with soul force. (My Lord) The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people (Hmm), for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny [sustained applause], and they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” (Never) We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. (Yes) We can never be satisfied [applause] as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. [applause] We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 170 larger one. (Yes) We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating for whites only. [applause] (Yes, Hallelujah) We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. (Yeah, That’s right, Let’s go) [applause] No, no, we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters (Yes) and righteousness like a mighty stream. [applause] (Let’s go, Tell it)

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. (My Lord) Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. (My Lord, That’s right) Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution (Yeah, Yes) and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith (Hmm) that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi (Yeah), go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities (Yes), knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. (Yes) Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. (My Lord)

I say to you today, my friends [applause], so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow (Uh-huh), I still have a dream. (Yes) It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. (Yes)

I have a dream (Mhm) that one day (Yes) this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed (Hah): “We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal.” (Yeah, Uh-huh, Hear hear) [applause]

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia (Yes, Talk), the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream (Yes) [applause] that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice (Yeah), sweltering with the heat of oppression (Mhm), will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 171

I have a dream (Yeah) [applause] that my four little children (Well) will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. (My Lord) I have a dream today. [enthusiastic applause]

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists (Yes, Yeah), with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification” (Yes), one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. [applause] (God help him, Preach)

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted (Yes), every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain (Yes), and the crooked places will be made straight (Yes), and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed [cheering], and all flesh shall see it together. (Yes Lord)

This is our hope. (Yes, Yes) This is the faith that I go back to the South with. (Yes) With this faith (My Lord) we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. (Yes, All right) With this faith (Yes) we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation (Yes) into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. (Talk about it) With this faith (Yes, My Lord) we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together (Yes), to stand up for freedom together (Yeah), knowing that we will be free one day. [sustained applause]

This will be the day, this will be the day when all of God’s children (Yes, Yeah) will be able to sing with new meaning: “My country, ‘tis of thee (Yeah, Yes), sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. (Oh yes) Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride (Yeah), from every mountainside, let freedom ring!” (Yeah)

And if America is to be a great nation (Yes), this must become true. So let freedom ring (Yes, Amen) from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. (Uh-huh) Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. (Yes, all

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 172 right) Let freedom ring (Yes) from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado. (Well) Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. (Yes) But not only that: (No) Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia. [cheering] (Yeah, Oh yes, Lord) Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. (Yes) Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. (Yes) From every mountainside (Yeah) [sustained applause], let freedom ring.

And when this happens [applause] (Let it ring, Let it ring), and when we allow freedom ring (Let it ring), when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city (Yes Lord), we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children (Yeah), black men (Yeah) and white men (Yeah), Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics (Yes), will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! (Yes) Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!” [enthusiastic applause].

Source: https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/i-have-dream-address- delivered-march-washington-jobs-and-freedom

Appendix 12: Quotes by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King

I don't even call it violence when There is no better than adversity. it's in self defense; I call it Every defeat, every heartbreak, intelligence. every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time. Nobody can give you freedom. A genuine leader is not a searcher Nobody can give you equality or for consensus but a molder of justice or anything. If you're a man, consensus. you take it.

You don't have to be a man to fight Darkness cannot drive out darkness; for freedom. All you have to do is only light can do that. Hate cannot to be an intelligent human being. drive out hate; only love can do that.

Education is the passport to the We must accept finite future, for tomorrow belongs to disappointment, but never lose those who prepare for it today. infinite hope.

If you have no critics you'll likely Faith is taking the first step even have no success. when you don't see the whole staircase.

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Source: https://www.myenglishpages.com/site_php_files/efl-esl-resources.php?c=35

Appendix 13: Malcolm X Listening Comprehension

Malcolm X (19th May 1925 – 21st February 1965)

Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_X

Who was Malcolm X?

What shaped his life?

What happened to Malcolm X in prison?

Why did he change his surname?

In how far did he differ from the Civil Rights Movement?

Appendix 14: Plot summary of Invisible Man - moderation cards

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Battle Royal College Ride with Bledsoe’s letters Liberty Mr. of Paint – Norton recommendation Optic White

Hospitalisation Time at the Clifton’s Ras the Fall down Brotherhood death the Exhorter manhole

Appendix 15: Quotations from Invisible Man

Quotations Personal remarks

But my world has become one of infinite possibilities (IM 576).

Up above there’s an increasing passion to make men conform to pattern (IM 576).

Diversity is the word (IM 577).

There’s a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play (IM 581).

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 175

CURRICULUM VITAE

Persönliche Daten: Mag. Martin Alexander Delucca, BA Dr.-Stumpf-Straße 130 6020 Innsbruck

geb. am 26. Oktober 1978 in Bozen Italienischer Staatsbürger

Schulausbildung:

1984-1989 Volksschule St. Ulrich 1989-1992 Mittelschule St. Ulrich 1992-1997 Realgymnasium “Jakob Philip Fallmerayer” - Neusprachliche Fachrichtung in Brixen

Hochschulausbildung:

10/1999 – 04/2006 Diplomstudium Anglistik/Amerikanistik, Deutsche Philologie Studienabschluss: Magister der Philosophie (Mag.phil.) 03/2009 – 03/2013 Bachelorstudium Erziehungswissenschaften, Studienabschluss: Bachelor of Arts and Humanities (BA) 10/2012 – 03/2020 Lehramtstudium für die Fächer Englisch und Deutsch 09/2012- 09/2014 Lehrgang „Beratung und Intervention im Bereich Sexualität“ an der Universität Innsbruck sowie Schloss Hofen: „Akademischer Experte für Sexualberatung“ Derzeit: Bildungskarenz: Psychoanalytisches Propädeutikum 03/2020 Abschluss des Lehramtstudiums

Zivildienst:

01/98-11/98 Rettungssanitäter bei der “Croce Bianca Trento” in Trient

Native Sons or Invisible Men? 176