The Invisible Correlation Between Plath and Ellison

While we were reading Invisible Man, I started noticing some eerie parallels to Sylvia Plath’s writing,
which is odd. There’s barely anything to classify Ralph Ellison and Plath as connected genre-wise or
time-wise, really, but there are many shared archetypes and themes, especially regarding the factory
hospital scene in Invisible Man. In both IM and Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, as well as Plath’s poem “Lady
Lazarus”, we see similar elements of disillusionment, oppression, and a feeling of rebirth. In the 1950s,
neither African-Americans nor women were having it all that good, to say the least, so it does make
some sense why their narratives may seem to overlap. At the same time, you can sense a bit more
intensity of oppression in Invisible Man; not to say that Plath’s struggles and writing aren’t undeniably
harrowing of course.

In both The Bell Jar and Chapter Eleven of Invisible Man, we see a correlation between the attitudes of
medical professions treating those who can’t help themselves in their dismissive, even oppressive
nature. Throughout the novel, Esther frequently experiences fear around doctors, which manifests into
the anxiety that defines much of her time at Dr. Gordon’s institution. Dr. Gordon, as many of the male
doctors and authority figures are shown to be, is also quite dismissive of her needs and concerns,
especially when it comes to her own botched shock treatments. She cannot bear to return and do more
of them, and her mother’s response to this is basically, “I knew you weren’t crazy, now let’s get back to
normal.” A lot of this is triggered by an earlier scene, where we learn that Esther witnessed a delivery at
the hospital and saw how the doctors drugged and dismissed the mother. The doctors of Invisible Man
are even more brutal. While the narrator is undergoing “treatment”, not knowing he can actually hear
him (and probably not caring), the doctors joke about performing gruesome experiments, potentially
even lobotomizing or castrating him. Then when the narrator is getting shocked, they mock him for his
induced seizing, saying things like, “They really do have rhythm, don’t they?” (235) and laughing.
Once the narrator begins to emerge, they continue to mock his vegetative state and call him “boy”,
something not uncommon to the narrator at this point. 

Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” is arguably one of the most powerful poems to be written by a modern
writer. In it, she explores her previous suicide attempts and depressive episodes and frames her
recovery in an empowering light. She frames it as a giant rebirth. At the end of the poem, she writes,
“Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” (Plath 83-84). In addition, she taunts
her oppressors with her language, saying, “Peel off the napkin / Oh my enemy. / Do I terrify?--” (Plath
10-12), and later, “So, so Herr Doktor. / So, Herr Enemy. / I am your opus. / I am your valuable, / The
pure gold baby / That melts to a shriek.” (Plath 65-71), and once later, “Herr God, Herr Lucifer /
Beware / Beware.” (Plath 79-81). In framing those who hurt her so much in life, especially male
doctors, it seems, as a brand of Nazis, she reclaims her power as a defeater of evil. She also frames
her rebirth as somewhat of a performance, with the lines, “The peanut-crunching crowd / Shoves in to
see. / Them unwrap me hand and foot-- / The big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies / These are my
hands / My knees. / I may be skin and bone, / Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.” (Plath
26-34). 

While the narrator’s rendition might not be as poetic as Plath’s, the narrator’s discharge from this
makeshift hospital is empowering nonetheless. Determined not to let them get the best of him, he
keeps his mentality on himself, as his grandfather ominously told him just before dying. When the
doctors show the slate saying “Who was your mother?” he thinks to himself, “I don’t play the dozens.
And how’s your old lady doing today?” (241). When he’s meeting with the man who declares that he’s ‘
cured’, the narrator starts rambling, and readers are confused, until we realize that the narrator is
actually messing with the doctors right back; performing in his own way. He asks if they know Mr.
Norton, as if he’s some sort of white icon, if they know “Bled”, jokes about how he has so many
friends like these men, and says as he shook the man’s hand, “And now our palaver is finished.”
(249). He then strolls off confidently, thinking about how unafraid he is now. His experience following
the shock treatments is much like a rebirth, too; he wakes up unable to say his own name, unable to
remember anything, and yet he’s also had much of his fear stripped from him. It isn’t long after this
that the narrator starts fresh and joins the Brotherhood, a phase which ends up dominating the
remainder of the novel. 

To wrap up, I don’t exactly know why I found such a connection with Ellison’s writing to that of Plath’s, but this one scene in Invisible Man really evokes memories from reading The Bell Jar and learning about Plath in Coming-Of-Age Novel class last spring. Perhaps it’s the similar dreamlike yet raw style of writing, or the similar feeling of desperation and anxiety that plagues both protagonists. One could say that Invisible Man itself is somewhat of a coming-of-age story - sure, he’s well into his thirties or even forties by the end, but this is a story of how the narrator went from being a bright naive high schooler to a shrewd, ominous, underground vigilante trope. Nonetheless, it's a strange, yet oddly philosophical bond that these texts share, whilst being from completely different times and people.

You Can Play the Game, But...

One of our Friday poetry readings that I remember quite vividly (despite the fact that we’ve only had a few so far), is the reading of “A Poem for Players” by Al Young, which Jenna so expertly read and delved into. The gist of the poem is saying, “you can do whatever you want, just not as yourself”. You can be a famous baseball player, a blues musician, a lawyer, even, but you have to “play the game”. What is this game? The answer to that is quite complicated, and it’s a notion that the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man wrestles with constantly. Constantly trying to find his place, his vocation, the naive young high school graduate spends twenty years on the run before succumbing to his “invisibility”. How this came about is pretty much the plot of the novel, but the idea of “playing the game” or expectations being blown away is a constant theme. 

In the very first chapter, we see the narrator attempting to “play the game”, and being derailed in doing so. He goes to this “battle royale” with hopes of reading a grand speech he wrote, and he ends up becoming this brutally grotesque form of entertainment alongside a bunch of other young black men. They are forced to fight each other, have coins thrown on an electric carpet to fish for, and are intimidated by a stark naked white woman. By the end, he’s finally allowed to give his speech, and no one really takes him seriously, but he doesn’t seem to care; sure it wasn’t what he was expecting, but all he had his eyes set on the whole time was giving his speech. This correlates with the line, “Finally they’ll let you play / politics if you don’t get in the way / the way some of us did and had to be / iced by conspiracy, international mystery” (Young 30-33). While the boys in the battle royale weren’t necessarily “iced”, and the narrator wasn’t necessarily involved in politics, there was still this bizarre ritual they were thrown into against their will, and they were almost expected to act as if it were completely normal. At least the narrator did - he just did as he was told so I could give his precious speech. 

In one of the most peculiar chapters of this already-quite-surreal novel is chapter three, when the narrator is driving Mr. Norton around and stop by Golden Day to find some whiskey to aid Mr. Norton’s condition. After chaos ensues, one of the calmer veterans takes the narrator and Norton into a separate room to assess Norton’s condition, and ends up giving a lengthy speech in which he feeds some brutal truth to the narrator and berates Mr. Norton for his support of a black college. He says to Norton, “he has eyes and ears and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life. Understand. (...) He registers his senses but short-circuits his brain. Nothing has meaning. He takes it in but he doesn’t digest it. Already he is - well, bless my soul! Behold! A walking zombie! Already he’s learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity.” (94). 

A couple chapters later, the president of the college, Dr. Bledsoe, removes his mask of perfection and humbleness to give a similar speech about reality. In chapter six, Bledsoe berates the narrator for his actions towards Norton, and he ends up going on an intense tangent about power and race and the true meaning of the college. He jeers about his power over the “system”, saying “‘You’re nobody, son. You don’t exist - can’t you see that? The white folk tell everybody what to think - except men like me.’” (143). But then his mode shifts as he talks about the tribulations that lead him to this “secret power” - playing the part. “‘I mean it, son,’ he said. ‘I had to be strong and purposeful to get where I am. I had to wait and plan and lick around… Yes, I had to act the *n-word*!’” (...) “‘I don’t even insist that it was worth it, but now I’m here and I mean to stay - after you win the game, you take the prize and you keep it, protect it; there’s nothing else to do.’” (143). Later, Bledsoe continues by distinguishing what he had to give up to “win the game” - his dignity. “‘I know all about that too; ole doc’s been ‘buked and scorned and all that. (...) But you’ll get over it; it’s foolish and expensive and a lot of dead weight. You let the white folk worry about pride and dignity - you learn where you are and get yourself power, influence, contacts with powerful and influential people - then stay in the dark and use it!’” (144-145). 

The vet’s speech is quite polarizing for the narrator, Norton, and the majority of readers, and Bledsoe’s speech literally knocks the air out of the narrator and causes him to stumble out of the office vomiting and delirious. At this point in the novel, the narrator is still quite young and naive, and hasn’t really come to grapple with what it means for him to be “invisible”; he’s still under the impression that he can keep driving Mr. Norton around and work for Dr. Bledsoe and graduate with honors and eventually become Bledsoe’s assistant, perhaps. He doesn’t know that there are limits to his abilities and consciousness, as said in the lines, “but you gots to remember that / that’s all there is” (Young 18-19), which come after describing many common tropes in “white” theater and music, or the black pioneers that most white people idolized at the time, all of whom weren’t “too black”. Bledsoe speaks of playing the role leading him to a sort of power, but all without any dignity.

A lot of what we’ve read in Invisible Man is a reflection of the narrator coming to grips with the message of “A Poem for Players”. At the end of chapter one, the narrator has a peculiar dream in which his grandfather is helping bestow his award upon him, and on the note it says, “keep this *n-word*-boy running”. That’s become a common theme throughout the book - the narrator going somewhere he thinks will bring him his purpose or some sort of success, and at the end of the day, he’s back out running, as none of these vocations seem to hold what he can reasonably do. I remember learning in Race, Class, Gender about the “Fight of the Century”, a boxing match which occurred on March 8, 1971 in which two prominent black boxers, Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali, fought. Frazier ended up winning, and later gave a lighthearted speech on his victory in South Carolina - in a stage house that held a Confederate flag. To whites at the time, Frazier was playing his role in appeasing whites and not rocking the boat, something Ali was known to do. All of this reflects on the penultimate line of Young’s poem, “They’ll let you play anybody but you, / that’s pretty much what they will do” (Young 34-35). 

Works Cited:

Young, Al. "A Poem for Players." The Oxford Anthology of African-American

     Poetry, edited by Arnold Rampersad, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp.

     118-19.

*sources not marked “Young” are from Invisible Man