A "Door-In" to Literature

Ralph Ellison’s writing, as we’ve seen reading Invisible Man is stoked with symbolism. In discussing his novel, it seems as though every other word is making some sort of reference to a deeper meaning, a deeper message that the reader must uncover. In fact, every other word is not nearly as much of a hyperbole as it may seem on the surface, as one of the most symbolic aspects of Invisible Man is the names of the characters themselves. The first character to discuss is obviously the narrator and his lack of a name entirely. This is obviously an allusion to his invisibility. He has lost any sense of himself by being pulled around by societies’ whims. Another obvious connection with a name is Rinehart, whose name we talked about a bit in class. The name “Rinehart” seems like a combination of the words “rind”, like the outside layer of something (usually in the context of fruit), and “heart”. “Rind” has clear connections to the outside, the visible layer that must be peeled back to reveal...

       Reading the description of Brother Tod Clifton that the narrator gives on page 363 of Invisible Man is certainly a bit jarring. No other character is described in nearly as much detail, nor as positively. To show just how unusual this description is, here is the narrator’s description of Brother Jack upon first meeting him, “A short insignificant-looking bushy-eyebrowed man with a quiet smile on his face stood beside me, looking not at all like a policemen” (287). That is the whole description. One single sentence that leaves the actual character’s features vague and undefined. Now, here is a section of the description of Brother Clifton, “I saw the broad taut span of his knuckles across the dark grain of the wood, the muscular, sweatered arms, the curving line of the chest rising to the easy pulsing of his throat, to the square, smooth chin, and saw a small X-shaped patch of adhesive upon the subtly blended, velvet-over-stone, granite-over-bone, Afro-Anglo-S...