Реферат: The Narrator Essay Research Paper The narrator
Название: The Narrator Essay Research Paper The narrator Раздел: Топики по английскому языку Тип: реферат |
The Narrator Essay, Research Paper The narrator’s grandparents were freed slaves who believed they were separate but equal after the Civil War. His grandfather lived a meek and quiet life after being freed. However, on his deathbed, he tells the narrator’s father that the lives of black Americans are a ‘war’ and that he himself feels like a traitor. He counsels the narrator’s father to undermine the whites with ‘yeses’ and ‘grins.’ He advises his family to ‘agree ‘em to death and destruction.’ His grandfather’s dying words haunt the narrator. He lives meekly, like his grandfather. Like him, the narrator receives praise from the white members of his town, but feels troubled that his grandfather branded such meekness as treachery. On his graduation day, he delivers a speech preaching humility and submission as the key to the advancement of black Americans. The speech is such a success that the town arranges to have him deliver it at a gathering of the community’s leading white citizens. He arrives and is told to take part in the ‘battle royal’ that figures as part of the evening’s entertainment. The narrator and some of his classmates don boxing gloves and enter the ring. A naked, blond, white woman with an American flag painted on her stomach parades about as the white men demand that they look at her. Afterwards, the white men blindfold the youths and order them to viciously pummel one another. The narrator is defeated in the last round. After they remove the blindfolds, the contestants are led to a rug covered with coins and a few crumpled bills. They lunge for the money, only to discover that the rug is electrified. The white men attempt to force the victims to fall face forward onto the rug during the mad scramble. While the narrator gives his speech, they all laugh and ignore him as he quotes verbatim large sections of Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Exposition Address.” In the midst of the amused, drunken requests that he repeat the phrase ’social responsibility,’ the narrator accidentally says ’social equality.’ The white men angrily demand that he explain himself. He states that he made a mistake. He finishes to uproarious applause. They award him a calfskin briefcase. He is told to cherish it as a ‘badge of office’ because one day ‘it will be filled with important papers that will shape the destiny’ of his people. He is overjoyed to find a scholarship to the state college for black youth inside. He does not even care when later he discovers that the gold coins from the electrified rug are worthless brass tokens. That night he has a dream of going to a circus with his grandfather who refuses to laugh at the clowns. He instructs the narrator to open the briefcase. Inside, the narrator finds an official envelope with a state seal. He opens it only to find another envelope that contains another envelope. The last one contains an engraved document reading: “To Whom It May Concern, Keep This Nigger-Boy Running.” The narrator awakes with his grandfather’s laughter ringing in his ears. Analysis The narrator’s grandfather intensifies the theme of ambiguity. He confesses that he feels as though his meekness in the face of the South’s enduring racist structure makes him a traitor. It is unclear whom he feels he has betrayed: himself, his family, or his race. All his life, he had espoused faith in the Jim Crow structure of equality with segregation, but on his deathbed he rejects this faith. He advises his family to have two identities as a form of self-protection. On the outside they should embody the stereotypical ‘good slaves,’ behaving just as their former white masters wish, but they should never fully believe in this identity. On the inside, they should retain their bitterness and resentment against the imposed false identity. By following the grandfather’s model, they can refuse to accept second-class status internally, protect their own self-respect, and avoid betraying themselves. The theme of subterfuge through masks will become increasingly important later in the novel. A mask becomes a form of defense against the aggressive and hostile onslaughts of others against the individual’s self-concept. The grandfather’s advice can also indicate a form of resistance. He tells his family to play the role of the ‘good slaves’ so well that it almost becomes a parody. Excessive obedience to Southern whites’ expectations can become disobedience. The grandfather wants his family to exploit to their advantage the rift between how others perceive them and how they perceive themselves. The narrator believes that blind obedience will win him respect and praise. The white men offer him success on one hand for obedience, but on the other hand they use obedience to degrade him with the barbaric battle royal. The boys are expected to accept blindness by wearing the blindfolds in return for the dubious reward of false coins on an electrified rug. The white men wear false masks of goodwill that barely conceal their real, racist motives. They remain blind to their own brutish, drunken behavior by forcing the boys to conform to the racial stereotype of the black man as a violent, savage, over-sexed beast. The narrator has not yet learned to see behind the surfaces of things. He believes that surface appearances are true only to discover later that his ’sight’ failed him. The coins are false and the innocuous-looking rug is electrified. The narrator’s speech contains long quotations from Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Exposition Address,” but he doesn’t actually name Washington directly. Washington’s program for the advancement of black Americans emphasized industrial education. He believed blacks should avoid clamoring for political and civil rights and instead should put their energy toward achieving economic success. The narrator’s grandfather lived by that ideology only to recognize that it contained major limitations. Washington hoped for racial equality through the assumption of the role of ‘the model black citizen:’ “Work hard, but don’t draw attention to yourself by demanding political and civil rights.” His philosophy could only go so far. The successful black businessman was as vulnerable to racial prejudice as the poor, uneducated sharecropper. He mistakenly believed economic success would lead to freedom. The narrator slips and says ’social equality’ while delivering his address. Whereas the white men conceded some ‘benevolence’ to the narrator when he embodied the ‘model black citizen,’ they show their true faces when he slips. This turn reveals the limitations of Washington’s philosophy. The narrator’s blind obedience to the ‘good slave’ role does not ‘free’ him from racism. The moment he exhibits something like an individual opinion, the white men demand that he return to the ‘good slave’ role. Retracting the verbal slip, he does so, and they reward him with the briefcase and the scholarship. They allow him to pursue social advancement, but only on their terms. They want him to speak in such a way that affirms their belief in their natural superiority. He is told to consider the briefcase a ‘badge of office.’ Ironically this ‘office’ is that of the ‘good slave’ that they have forced him to play. The briefcase will appear several times throughout the novel as a reminder of the bitter irony of this speech. The narrator has yet to tell the difference between espousing an ideology and playing a role. His dream hints at his vague awareness of the real meaning behind the incident. The scholarship is a gift with ambiguous significance. On the surface it appears to symbolize the white men’s benevolent generosity, but underneath it symbolizes their control over his identity. > Invisible Man – Chapters 2-3 Summary The narrator is fascinated by his recollection of the bronze statue of the college Founder. He describes the statue as a ‘cold Father symbol’ with ‘empty eyes.’ At the end of his junior year, the narrator is assigned the task of driving around Mr. Norton, one of the college’s white millionaire founders. He innocently drives Norton beyond the campus to an area of ramshackle cabins nearby. The cabins are left over slave quarters now inhabited by poor black sharecroppers. Norton is intrigued by them, and the narrator immediately regrets having driven him to this area since Jim Trueblood lives in one of them. The college regards Trueblood with hatred and distrust because he has committed incest with his now-pregnant daughter. Norton reacts with horror when the narrator reveals this information, but he insists on speaking with Trueblood. Trueblood explains that he committed incest because he had a strange dream, and he woke up while having sex with his daughter. Norton listens with a morbid, voyeuristic fascination. Trueblood expresses wonder at the fact that white people have showered him with more money and help than ever before after he has broken the unspeakable taboo of incest. Norton, shocked at the story, hands Trueblood a hundred dollar bill to buy toys for his children. He gets back into the car in a daze and requests some whiskey to calm his nerves. The narrator, fearing that Norton might die from shock, drives to the nearest tavern, the Golden Day, which also happens to be a brothel. When he arrives, a group of mentally-disturbed war veterans are on leave for the afternoon at the Golden Day. The proprietor refuses to sell take-out whiskey. Some of the veterans help carry Norton inside as he has fallen unconscious. Once they pour some whiskey down his throat, he begins to regain consciousness. The attendant in charge of the veterans shouts down to ask what the ruckus is about and a brawl ensues. Norton falls unconscious again, and the narrator and one of the veterans carry him upstairs near the prostitutes. This particular veteran claims to be a doctor and a graduate of the college. After Norton awakes, the veteran mocks his interest in the narrator and the college. He claims that Norton must view the narrator as a mark on his scorecard of achievement, not as a man; and similarly, the narrator must not relate to Norton as a man either, but as a God or a ‘great white father.’ He calls the narrator an automaton stricken with a blindness that makes him do Norton’s bidding. He claims that the narrator’s blindness is Norton’s chief asset. Norton becomes angry and demands that the narrator take him back to the college. During the ride back, Norton remains completely silent. Analysis The theme of blindness continues with the description of the statue of the Founder of the college. The statue does not really depict an individual, but a ‘father symbol.’ It may appear that the Founder has made his mark on history, but we never even learn his name. His individuality and his humanity are lost. Only a cold, nameless bronze statue remains. The Founder’s anonymity echoes the absence of Booker T. Washington’s name in the narrator’s graduation speech after the battle royal even though the narrator quotes verbatim large sections of his “Atlanta Exposition Address.” Washington exercised an enormous political influence over race relations, but even his name disappears from the history the narrator tells in his speech. The Founder and Washington become doubles. Both men set out to design a program for the advancement of black Americans. Both fought for the right to higher education for black Americans and both are fervently worshipped by their followers as ‘great visionaries.’ And sadly, both have become invisible men since not even a record of their names exists in the novel. The novel also reveals that they are stricken with blindness: Washington’s program partook of the mistaken illusion that economic advancement would equal ‘freedom’; while the Founder’s statue shows ‘empty’ eyes. Just as the dubious rewards of the battle royal incite the narrator and his classmates to turn on one another, the rewards of social advancement offered by the college incite the students and faculty to turn their backs on one of the least-empowered group of American blacks: the poor sharecropper. In an attempt to conform to the role of the ‘model black citizen’ expected of them by white trustees, they disown Trueblood for his incestuous act. Perhaps this dividing influence echoes the grandfather’s statement that blindly conforming to the ‘good slave’ role equals an act of treachery. Norton’s character complicates the relationship between the black American beneficiary of the wealthy, white benefactor’s generosity. His interest in the college lies less in his genuine desire to improve the difficulties of black Americans than in his own self-interest. He tells the narrator that he became involved in the college because, “I felt . . . that your people were somehow closely connected with my destiny.” He tells the narrator, “You are my fate.” Norton remains most concerned with his own self-image; he doesn’t even concede to the narrator the right to claim his fate as his own–instead, their fates become one. Norton feels most proud of his work with the college because it has allowed him to be involved in ‘organizing human life.’ Rather than the students being his fate, he is, in fact, the organizer of their common fate. He represents the power of invisibility because despite his absence and distance, his power allows him to become intimately involved in the lives of thousands of black students who have never even seen him. There is a chilling undertone to his words, “You are bound to a great dream and to a beautiful monument.” The narrator believes the school offers him freedom, but in fact, he is bound to the dreams and monuments of men like Norton. It becomes a kind of imprisonment to which both Norton and the narrator are blind. Norton’s reaction to the Trueblood story is also ironic. He enjoys a distinct voyeuristic pleasure in Trueblood’s story. Norton’s relationship with his own daughter suggests that Trueblood’s story allows him to live out vicariously his own incestuous desires. Norton continually mentions his daughter’s beauty and purity–at one point, he says, “I could never believe her to be my own flesh and blood.” He pays Trueblood one hundred dollars for describing the very sin he himself seems to have wanted to commit. He says the money is meant for Trueblood’s children, but his generosity is tinged with the same ambiguous significance, the same self-interest that marks his financial support of the college. The veteran at the Golden Day tavern calls the narrator an ‘automaton.’ This revives the problematic relationship between white benefactor and black beneficiary. He directly verbalizes Norton’s narcissism by stating that Norton sees the narrator as a mark on the scorecard of his achievement. Neither Norton nor the narrator take kindly to having their blindfolds removed. The narrator wishes to continue under the illusion that the college is offering him the freedom to determine his own fate and identity. However, the vet compares Norton’s position to an invisible puppet-master pulling the strings and the students’ to that of dancing marionettes: the blindness of one reinforces the blindness of the other. The vet is labeled ‘crazy’ for daring to see beneath the surface, and for telling the tale of what he has seen. > Invisible Man – Chapters 4-6 Summary Norton asks to be taken to his room and requests that Dr. Bledsoe, the president of the college, come and see him. Dr. Bledsoe becomes furious when the narrator informs him of the afternoon’s events. Bledsoe says he should have known to show powerful white trustees only what the college wants them to see. When Bledsoe arrives at Norton’s room, he orders the narrator to leave and go attend the evening chapel service. Later, the narrator receives a message that Bledsoe wants to speak with him in Norton’s room. However, he arrives to find only Mr. Norton, who informs him that Bledsoe had to leave suddenly, but that the narrator should see him after the evening service. Norton says that he explained to Bledsoe that the narrator was not responsible for what happened. Reverend Barbee, a black man wearing dark glasses, speaks at the chapel service. He tells the story of the Founder, a former slave born into poverty, but with a precocious intelligence. The Founder was almost killed as a child when a cousin splashed him with lye, ’shriveling his seed.’ After nine days in a coma, he awoke as though he had ‘risen from the dead or had been reborn.’ He taught himself how to read and later became a runaway slave. He went North and pursued further education. After many years, he returned to the South and founded the college to which he devoted the rest of his life’s work. The sermon deeply moves the narrator. Barbee stumbles on the way back to his chair, his glasses fall from his face, and the narrator catches a glimpse of his sightless eyes–Barbee is blind. The narrator meets with Bledsoe after the service. When he learns that the narrator took Norton to the old slave quarters, the Golden Day and the Trueblood cabin, Bledsoe becomes very angry. The narrator explains that Norton ordered him to stop at the cabin. Bledsoe says that white people are always giving orders, and that the narrator, having grown up in the South as a black man, should know how to lie his way out of such orders. Bledsoe plans to investigate both the veteran who mocked Norton and the college; he also plans to expel the narrator. The narrator threatens to tell everyone that Bledsoe lied to Norton about not punishing him. Bledsoe is shocked. He has worked hard to achieve his position of power and doesn’t plan to lose it. However, he tells the boy to go to New York for the summer and work to earn his year’s tuition. He offers to send letters of recommendation to some of the trustees to ensure that he gets work. If he does well, Bledsoe hints that he will be able to return to school. The next day, the narrator retrieves seven sealed letters and promises Bledsoe that he holds no resentment for his punishment. Bledsoe praises his attitude, but the narrator remains haunted by his grandfather’s prophetic dying words. Analysis Bledsoe is a master of masks. Imperious and commanding with the narrator, he becomes conciliatory and servile with Norton. Bledsoe’s infuriated response to the narrator’s explanation that he drove Norton to the old slaves quarters simply because Norton had asked him to aggravates him further: “Damn what he wants. We take these white folks where we want them to go, we show them what we want them to see. Don’t you know that?” The narrator is shocked to learn that the surface appearance of humble servility is a mask under which Bledsoe manipulates and deceives powerful white donors to his advantage. He is also shocked that Bledsoe thought he knew this all along. However, the narrator has had blind faith in the ‘truth’ of the surface appearance until now. Moreover, Bledsoe has attempted to preserve the rich donors’ blindness to some aspects of the black experience in the South. He becomes angry when he learns that the narrator has unwittingly removed the blindfold from at least one of them. The narrator has disrupted the masquerade of the ‘model black citizen,’ and Bledsoe anxiously seeks to repair the damage. The narrator’s own blindfold has been removed, and the knowledge he has gained overwhelms him. He is branded a traitor to the college’s image, and he again remembers his grandfather’s words: believing in the mask of meekness is treachery. Bledsoe, echoing Booker T. Washington’s philosophy, practices humility and preaches the virtue of humble contentment with one’s ‘place’ to the students; but he has been living the grandfather’s advice and uses it as a mask to his own advantage. However, we find that Bledsoe uses his humility mask to dupe the students as well the white donors. He uses the college and Washington’s ideology for the preservation of his own position of power rather than for the broad social progress for his people. While toying with an old leg shackle from slavery, he explains the narrator’s expulsion by claiming that he has become ‘dangerous to the college.’ Bledsoe calls the shackle a ’symbol of progress.’ The narrator’s threat to expose Bledsoe’s double-dealing to Norton and the rest of the college quickly changes Bledsoe’s manner. Bledsoe tells the narrator that he has ‘played the nigger’ long and hard to get to his position and he doesn’t plan to let one young, naive student vanquish his accomplishments. Thus, we find evidence that that his concern for the college’s image is really just a mask, a cover up of his selfish concern for his image. Bledsoe’s power depends on preventing the narrator from ripping his mask off and exposing his duplicity. He tells the boy to go to New York for the summer, and suggests that he might be allowed to return to school in the fall. It will become clear later that the narrator has still not learned to see beneath the surface; he trusts Bledsoe and overlooks his , propensity for double-dealing precisely when he should most remember it. The narrator’s grandfather advised his family to use masks as a form of self-defense and resistance against racist white power, but Bledsoe uses it as a weapon against members of his own race. Moreover, he uses it to achieve an influential position within the white-dominated power structure rather than as a means to dismantle it, ultimately revealing the limitations of the grandfather’s philosophy. Reverend Barbee’s sermon on the Founder develops this theme further. Every student is expected to attend this service and receive a peculiar ‘education.’ Rather than teaching the students to take advantage of invisibility through masks like Bledsoe, the sermon reinforces blind faith and allegiance to the college’s and Bledsoe’s outward philosophy. The sermon treats the Founder like a god of sorts, whose ideology should be trusted completely like a religion. The sermon implies that his ideology and his life represent a universal example that should be followed blindly rather than skillfully manipulated, as in Bledsoe’s case. Even the Founder himself, the figure head of the college’s power and glory, is castrated. In childhood, a cousin threw lye on him and ’shriveled his seed.’ If the Founder himself is sterile, how can his vision and his legacy be fertile? His legacy’s ‘offspring’ are a blind preacher, the double-dealing Bledsoe, and a narcissistic Boston philanthropist who refuses to admit his own incestuous attraction to his deceased daughter. The Founder’s ‘re-birth’ signifies a form of death: his name is lost to history; and he becomes an empty symbol manipulated by men like Bledsoe to preserve the blindness of others. The reverent sermon revives the narrator’s blind love and devotion to the college and to its program; however, this devotion prompts the narrator to blindly accept a rotten deal with Bledsoe. Bledsoe’s shackle becomes a symbol of continuing enslavement to multiple forms of blindness. > Invisible Man – Chapters 7-9 Summary On the bus to New York, the narrator encounters the veteran who mocked Norton and the college. Bledsoe has arranged to have him transferred to a psychiatric facility in Washington D.C. The narrator doesn’t believe Bledsoe could have anything to do with it, but the veteran winks and tells him to learn to see under the surface of things. He tells the narrator to hide himself from white people, from authority, from the ‘big man who’s never there’ but is always ‘pulling his strings.’ Crenshaw, the veteran’s attendant, tells him that he talks too much. The veteran replies that he verbalizes things that most men only feel. Before he transfers to another bus, the veteran advises the narrator, “Be your own father.” The narrator arrives in New York and is astonished to see a black officer directing white drivers in the street. He sees a gathering on a sidewalk in Harlem. A man is giving a speech about ‘chasing them out’ in a West Indian accent. The narrator feels as though a riot could erupt at any minute. He has seen Ras the Exhorter giving a speech. He quickly finds a place called the Men’s House and takes a room. Over the next few days, the narrator delivers all of his letters except one addressed to Mr. Emerson. After a week, he receives no responses. He tries to reach the trustees by phone only to receive polite refusals from their secretaries. His money is beginning to run out, and he entertains vague doubts about Bledsoe. The narrator sets out to deliver his last letter and meets a jive-talking man named Peter Wheatstraw who recognizes his southern roots. He tells the narrator that Harlem is nothing but a bear’s den, reminding the narrator of the stories of Jack the Rabbi t and Jack the Bear. He stops for breakfast at a deli. The waiter says he looks like he’d enjoy the special: pork chops, grits, eggs, hot biscuits, and coffee. Insulted, the narrator orders orange juice, toast, and coffee. The narrator arrives at Mr. Emerson’s office. He meets Mr. Emerson’s son, a nervous little man. Emerson leaves with the letter only to return with a vaguely disturbed expression, chattering about his ‘analyst’ and ’some things being too unjust for words .’ Finally, Emerson allows the narrator to read the letter: Bledsoe has told each of the addressees that the narrator was permanently expelled and had to be sent away under false pretenses to protect the college; he never intended for the narrator to di scover the finality of his expulsion. Emerson says that his father is a strict, unforgiving man and will not help him, but he offers to get the narrator a job at the Liberty Paints plants. That narrator leaves the office full of anger and a desire for r evenge. He imagines Bledsoe requesting that Mr. Emerson ‘hope the bearer of this letter to death and keep him running.’ He calls the plant for a job and is told to report to work the next morning. Analysis The reigning ideology in the South for the advancement of black Americans is that of Booker T. Washington and the college. Both white and black Southerners practice this ideology. At the Golden Day, the veteran succinctly pointed out the blindness and en slavement that this ideology entails, and Bledsoe ‘expels’ him from the South just as he expels the narrator. Unlike the narrator, however, the veteran has wanted a transfer for years. His defiance of the masquerade through ‘free speech’ earns him the ‘ freedom’ he has wanted, but that of course becomes an ironic victory. His trip North leads only to further confinement in another asylum in the capitol of a nation purportedly founded on the principles of freedom. The veteran tries to clarify the power system for the narrator. He tells the boy to lose his blindness and see under surface appearances because power works most efficiently when invisible, hidden behind deceptive masks. The veteran revives the doll met aphor with the image of important men pulling strings. Those controlling the narrator’s life remain invisible, hidden behind masks. Pulling his strings, they treat him like an object, not a person. However, the veteran ascribes the phrase ‘the big man who’s never there’ to powerful whites. He fails to recognize the manner in which black men like Bledsoe use this form of power against other black Americans. Ultimately, Bledsoe himself may remain blind to his own role as a mask behind which white power and influence can operate and propagate. He uses the same deceptive means to achieve power. However, as we noted in the last section, rather than dismantling the white-dominated power structure, he reinforces and reproduces it. The veteran represents an old literary trope: the fool. By exploiting the ambiguity of his comic and tragic role, he defines his version of the truth; and his fool’s mask allows him to speak openly with fewer consequences. However, his ambiguous banter keeps the reader unsure of his seriousness. For instance, when he advises the narrator to be his ‘own father’ before leaving the bus, he is actually offering his own ‘fatherly advice.’ He is telling the narrator to define his own identity, while simult aneously defining it for him. The narrator is on an archetypal journey. Like thousands of black Americans, he joins the Great Migration North looking for freedom. He marvels at the variety and vibrancy of Harlem. He sees Ras making an inflammatory speech in the street calling the b lack Harlem residents to drive out the whites, |