Analysis: Chapters 22 & 23

At this point in the novel, the narrator finally loses the illusion that he
can remain a free individual within the Brotherhood. He learns that
the condition for membership in the Brotherhood is blind obedience
to its ideology. Just as his college hired him to show Mr. Norton only
what the college wanted Norton to see, the Brotherhood has hired
him to say only what it wants people to hear, to be like the dancing
Sambo doll, playing a role defined by the Brotherhood. The
Brotherhoods anger over the narrators eulogy for Clifton reveals the
committee members own crippling blindness. If we interpret the
white members motivation for distancing themselves from Clifton as
his connection to the racist dolls, then it becomes clear that they
attach more political importance to a few offensive dolls than to the
murder of Clifton. Ultimately, then, their way of rejecting racism only
reproduces it: they end up condoning a racially motivated murder in
an overzealous attempt to protect the Brotherhoods image as an
antiracist organization. Their alleged idealism trivializes the concrete
reality of racism, as they value the condemnation of abstract racist
stereotypes over the condemnation of a racist murder. If, on the other
hand, we interpret the offensiveness of Cliftons dolls as a mere
pretense that Jack and the others use in order to break more cleanly
from Harlems interests, then it becomes clear that they are wholly
blind to the undeniable need for the advancement of black political
concerns. The committees blindness receives symbolic
representation in the form of Jacks glass eye. Significantly, the eye
falls out precisely as Jack describes the Brotherhoods ideological
position. Thus, it symbolizes both the blindness of the groups
ideology and the groups attempt to hide this blindness. Also
significant is Jacks declaration that the loss of his eye proves his
loyalty to the Brotherhood. The statement reveals Jacks conviction
that blindness constitutes both the prerequisite and the price for full
membership in the organization, for total adherence to its anti-
individualist ideology. Moreover, this scene demonstrates that this
blindness applies not only to the groups followerssuch as the
narratorbut also to its leaders. Rinehart proves one of the strangest
and most ambiguous figures in Invisible Man; though he never
appears in the flesh, he serves as a powerful symbol of the idea of a
protean or shape-shifting sense of identity, against which the
narrators own fragile sense of identity can be compared. Rinehart is
all things to all people, and those individuals whom the narrator
encounters while he wears his sunglasses impose a variety of
identities upon him. This fluidity of character plays a major role in the
narrators crucial realization that he is invisiblethat he has never
had a self because he has always adopted a self given to him by
others. Glimpsing Rineharts endlessly malleable self, the narrator
realizes for the first time that he does have his own self. He vows that,
though he may remain invisible to others, he will from that moment
forward be visible to himself.