<p>Advanced Placement English Invisible Man, Quiz 2, Chapters 1 - 6 Term 2 Name______Examine the following quotations from Invisible Man. Briefly give the context of each quotation, then explain the significance of the important images that you see in each. 1. “I learned in time though that it is possible to carry on a fight against them without their realizing it. For instance, I have been carrying on a fight with Monopolated Light & Power for some time now. I use their service and pay them nothing at all, and they don’t know it . . . . In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369 lights” (5 -7).</p><p>2. “Now I have one radio-phonograph; I plan to have five. There is a certain acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing “What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue” – all at the same time” (7 – 8).</p><p>3. “Son, after I’m gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open” (16). 4. “To Whom It May Concern,” I intoned. “Keep This Nigger-Boy Running.” I awoke with the old man’s laughter ringing in my ears (33).</p><p>5. “near the end of my junior year I drove for him during the week he was on the campus. A face pink like St. Nicholas’, topped with a shock of silk white hair. An easy, informal manner, even with me. A Bostonian, smoker of cigars, teller of polite Negro stories, shrewd banker, skilled scientist, director, philanthropist, forty years a bearer of the white man’s burden, and for sixty a symbol of the Great Traditions” (37).</p><p>6. “You have studied Emerson, haven’t you?” . . . . “Well, never mind. I am a New Englander, like Emerson. You must learn about him, for he was important to your people. He had a hand in your destiny. Yes, perhaps that is what I mean. I had a feeling that your people were somehow connected with my destiny. That what happened to you was connected with what would happen to me . . . “ (41).</p><p>7. “You see,” he said turning to Mr. Norton, “he has eyes and ears and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life. Understand. Understand? It’s worse than that. He registers with his senses but short-circuits his brain. Nothing has meaning. He takes it in but he doesn’t digest it. Already he is – well, bless my soul! Behold! A walking zombie! Already he’s 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 dreams, sir! The mechanical man!” (94). 8. “I remember the yellowed globes of frosted glass making lacy silhouettes on the gravel and the walk of the leaves and branches above us as we moved slow through the dusk so restless with scents of lilac, honeysuckle and verbena, and feel of spring greenness; and I recall the sudden arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass – gay- welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed; as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quite solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells” (109).</p><p>9. “ Then the orchestra played excerpts from Dvorak’s New World Symphony and I kept hearing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” resounding through its dominant theme – my mother’s and grandfather’s favorite spiritual. It was more than I could stand, and before the next speaker could begin I hurried past the disapproving eyes of teachers and matrons, out into the night. A mockingbird trilled a note from where it perched upon the hand of the moonlit Founder, slipping its moon-mad tail above the head of the eternally kneeling slave” (134).</p><p>10. I heard the high thin laugh again. “You’re nobody, son. You don’t exist – can’t you see that? The white folk tell everybody what to think – except men like me. I tell them; that’s my life, telling white folk how to think about the things I know about. Shocks you, doesn’t it? Well, that’s the way it is. It’s a nasty deal and I don’t always like it myself. But you listen to me: I didn’t make it, and I know that I can’t change it. But I’ve made my place in it and I’ll have every Negro in the country hanging on tree limbs by morning if it means staying where I am” (143).</p>