Chapter 25—Sight and Blindness

As the last chapter, everything blows up in this chapter in a very real way. The narrator has just left his “meeting” with Sybil and was called to Harlem, saying there is trouble. The narrator takes Sybil home and takes a bus to Harlem, to hear the riots in Harlem, which prompt him to run “blindly” (Ellison 534) towards the chaos.

            This is an important use of diction, because while the narrator has proclaimed himself the “Invisible Man”, it could be said that throughout the duration of the book he has been largely blinded to what has been going on around him. His story is a series of revelations to which he was previously too naïve or too occupied to recognize. He is indeed running “blindly” into Harlem and the madness it ensures.

            Everything is a mess when he gets there, and the narrator meets up with two men, Dupre and Scofield. Contributing to the surrounding riotous behavior, the narrator and his new friends loot a store and set their tenant building on fire to watch in burn and to protest their standard of living. As he leaves and is stumbling through the chaos, the narrator overhears a man call the commotion a “race riot” which indeed opens the narrator’s eyes to the intentions of the Brotherhood.

            “The words struck like bullets fired close range, blasting my satisfaction to earth. It was as though the uttered word had given meaning to the night, almost as though it had created it, brought it into being in the instant his breath vibrated small against the loud, riotous air. […] Could this be the answer, could this be what the committee had planned, the answer to why they’d surrendered our influence to Ras? […] It was not suicide, but murder.” (553).

This revelation that the narrator had “helped, had been a tool” (553) to the Brotherhood’s plan to start the riot made him feel powerless and guilty for the destruction he had helped cause, prompted by the manipulation of the Brotherhood. The narrator realizes that this what they had planned all along, and he is ashamed and shocked that he has been apart of it. He runs through Harlem to fins Ras. When he gets there, he reaches for his briefcase to get his dark “Rinehart” glasses, “only to see the crushed lenses fall to the street” (557). These glasses themselves could represent the blindness that the narrator has allowed himself, especially concerning the Brotherhood. Even upon hearing Ras’s voice, he reaches for the glasses almost as though to blind himself intentionally but is no longer able to, for he now sees what the brotherhood has done and what part he has played in their plans.

When Ras sees that the narrator is there, he tries to throw a spear at him but misses, perhaps blinded himself by the Brotherhood. Indeed, the narrator claims that he is not one of the Brothers, for they used him and tells Ras that they used him too, “they want you guilty of your own murder, your own sacrifice!” (558). Ras however, still blinded by the brotherhood, does not listen and as a result dies.

Questions:

1.     What do you think is the purpose of the mannequins hanging from light posts? Do you think the Brotherhood put them there?

2.     Do you think the Brotherhood planned for the narrator to stab Ras?

3.     Do you think that the narrator allows himself to be blinded and deceived?