A Thought to a Friend

I wrote this recently to a friend of mine, as she was reading Invisible Man (by Elison) for the first time.

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Many academic minds I've run into, both professor and undergraduate alike, note Ralph Elison's The Invisible Man as playing a pivotal role in their attempt to become culturally concious. The poignant beginning, especially the infamous "Battle Royale" chapter, is one that is considered cannon for anyone trying to build the foundations of "multiculturalism"--even to the point where it is edited, abridged, and passaged in high school literature textbooks.

But unlike many of my peers, the particulars of the "Battle Royale" strike a much more haunting tone than their analysiis. Many critics are keenly focused on the barbaric events in the first portion of the chapter; the narrator is teased by a nude woman, tricked and electrocuted, and then pushed into a brawling match. Each of these events have culturally significant ties to issues of race at the time. But what is most galling for the cause of black solidarity is how the narrator reacts to such a situation; he merely goes along with and at the end presents his speech.It is this speech which holds the dramatic irony of the chapter, and it is often overlooked in light of the more physical acts of bestiality found earlier. The novel's speaker argues in his main point that the black people must work for their success, as highlighted by a quaint tale of a ship which believes it needs water when really it needs to set its buckets into the fresh water below.
Naturally, our young narrator doesn't see the irony in his words. His story of the ship that has only to lower the buckets and drink is misplaced for a talk on race relations. The argument is misguided--in the metaphor, each ship is talking to one another as if they were equals. But the black and white communities at this time (and, arguably still) are not the same in any regard. This fact is punctuated by the entire scene before the speech; the black boys are treated as animals goaded by the white men. Likewise, the plight of the black and white communities reflect this dynamic--the white has the buckets and the black is thirsty. Ultimately, the young narrator trying to win a scholarship is repeating the very thing the whites in power want him to believe. He is allowed the scholarship because he is telling blacks to conform, to listen to the enlightened whites and "help themselves". The irony is that this argument, while a call to industry, is meant by whites as a distraction--by telling the black community to work harder, they can enjoy their relative superiority while the black population toils at a system which is already tipped against color. This young author is unwittingly asking to reconstruct the plantation system.