Invisible Man Lecture: I Am What I Am (Chapters 10-19) (Patreon)

‘I would be no one except myself - whoever I was...’

Today we continue our journey through the nightmare world of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. We're talking about dreams, myth, names, existential crisis, symbolism, segregation, individual vs group identity, the voice within us, and much more.

Video Timestamps:

• 0:00 shared reader responses to this great novel
• 2:00 nightmares, myths, & the quest for self
• 4:00 identification with our nameless narrator
• 5:00 dreams, universal language & hero’s journey
• 7:00 on descent as preface for rising again
• 8:00 symbolism in dream & literary analysis
• 11:00 on the recurrence of Emerson’s name
• 12:00 interpreting the symbolism of Liberty Paints
• 14:00 Ellison’s depiction of existential crisis
• 17:00 alienation & being trapped between worlds
• 19:00 the narrator’s fight with Brockway
• 21:00 surrealism & identity crisis at the hospital
• 24:00 Ralph Ellison’s superb defamiliarisation
• 26:00 identification with Buckeye the Rabbit
• 28:00 on the segregation of medical facilities
• 30:00 most invisible when we’re in a crowd
• 32:00 the existential crisis of our youth
• 34:00 what makes us who we truly are?
• 36:00 on feeling like an exile at home
• 38:00 losing ourselves to find ourselves
• 39:00 items that tell the story of our lives
• 40:00 the eviction & the narrator’s speech
• 41:00 listening to the voice within us
• 42:00 when action is actually inertia
• 44:00 Brother Jack & the Brotherhood
• 46:00 the people throw up their leaders
• 48:00 Ellison’s critique of group identification
• 50:00 ‘I would be no one except myself’
• 51:00 individual subservience to the group
• 54:00 ‘I was becoming someone else…’
• 56:00 ‘we create the race by creating ourselves’
• 58:00 cultures as a collective of individuals
• 59:00 Ras the Exhorter on the Harlem streets
• 1:00:00 ‘is that sanity? Is that consciousness?’
• 1:01:00 ‘I am what they think I am…’
• 1:02:00 the portrait of Frederick Douglass
• 1:03:00 ‘I’m a cog in a machine…’
• 1:04:00 when the narrator is deactivated
• 1:05:00 what are you making of the novel?

Resources:

• Ellison's Letters: If you have found yourself inspired and swept up by Invisible Man, you might like to get closer to the author. We're fortunate to have the selected letters of Ralph Ellison superbly compiled in this volume, which allows us even deeper into the mind of this great writer.
• Juneteenth: When we fall in love with a writer, we often want to check out the rest of their work. It is a shame that Ellison never finished the second novel that, after Invisible Man, he spent the rest of his life labouring over. But what we do have here is still brilliant.
• Psychology: If you enjoyed our discussion on dreams, symbolism, and the unconscious, then you might wish to check out Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung and The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud.
• Complementary Non-Fiction: For readers who have been finding 'Self-Reliance' a rewarding pairing, I recommend making 'History' your next Emerson essay. You might also want to dip into the writings of Henry David Thoreau in Walden.
• Biography Recommendation: The portrait of Frederick Douglass prompts our narrator to meditate upon his identity. If you in the mood for a great biography and would like to learn more about Douglass, I recommend the Pulitzer Prize winning Prophet of Freedom.
• Black and Blue: Treat yourself by watching the divine Louis Armstrong perform 'What Did I Do To Be So Black and Blue' live here. Do you agree that he has made poetry out of being invisible?
• Our Journey So Far: If you would like to revisit our previous lectures for Invisible Man, you can check them out here and here.
• Reading Assignment: Congratulations on bringing yourselves so fully to this great novel. Our next discussion will take us through to the end of novel, which runs to page 561 in the Penguin Modern Classics edition.

Questions for You:

1) How do we define ourselves? What makes you who you are?

2) What have your dreams been telling you lately?

3) What has been the most powerful part of the novel for you?

Happy reading, everybody!