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 ...

As James Baldwin argued, Native Son is a protest novel. Whether this fact inherently makes the book a failure to convey the complexity of race relations in America, I don’t really know. Richard Wright’s political intentions are obvious though, and in class we sort of fleshed out what he might be protesting. And while we briefly touched on it, I want to explore the idea that Wright is proposing communism as a “solution” to what he’s protesting. And perhaps this would not be surprising, as Wright supported the communist party at the time of the novel’s publication. As a relevant side note, I’ve kind of debated whether it’s fair to talk about “solutions” to large social problems. From a personal standpoint, I’ve generally considered myself to be an analytical person, especially considering how my engineer father looks for a way to make literally anything more efficient. Then when I first attended a social justice meeting, I found the discussion very unusual and kind of unsubstantial. Now ...