Infinite Content, Infinitely Content

Reading the dialogue between any of the characters in Invisible Man as they discuss Brotherhood ideology is an adventure into a bizarre rabbit hole. I keep trying to read into it as with any other aspect of the novel, but the words feel empty. It’s difficult to figure out what their ideology is. You can look deeper and deeper and then all you end up finding is rhetoric. Here’s a good line to illustrate this: “The people are fully aroused; if we fail to lead them into action, they will become passive, or they will become cynical. Thus it is necessary that we strike immediately and strike hard!” (pg. 363). Throughout other parts of the novel, you get a slight sense of their views on race perhaps, but other than that we have no idea what the Brotherhood beliefs. What do they mean when they say “action”? What does that look like? What does “striking hard” mean? What are they trying to do at all? This reminds me of the narrator’s speeches, where as readers we question whether he’s sayi...

My dad always said, or perhaps joked - the line with Serbs is thin - that the capital “I” in English is a testament to the vanity of the British. He’s not wrong in that English is probably one of the only languages which capitalizes exclusively this pronoun, although realistically I’d assume that there’s a niche linguistic explanation. Nonetheless, it’d be boring to merely assume this. You have to find some symbolism in everything, or maybe that’s just a side effect of reading Invisible Man. Admittedly, I’ve poked fun at people who try to extrapolate meaning from things like punctuation and capitalization. But the poem that Sarah presented, “I Have a Dream” by Pat Parker, made me remember my father’s remark. I realized that the capitalization was not an accident. While my father always referred to the “vanity of the British”, what was meant under the surface was a history of colonialism and the exploitation of others for the sake of profit; the capitalists of capitalists. For him, and ...