Invisible Man: Variants Of Time
WORKING INTRODUCTION: In Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man allows jazz music to tell his narrative. Invisible Man selects as the song to play jazz due to the multiple variants of time in place. He messes with time in order to establish a sense of self, and the individuality of the variants create an individualized experience. Identity for Invisible Man has been oppressed by the college, Ras the Exhorter, and the Brotherhood. All of these forces aim to control Invisible Man’s sense of time, and he works to stray away from them. Invisible Man must digress from the linear tempos of the college, as they attempt to control destiny, the Brotherhood, with their misdirected views, and Ras the Exhorter’s shifting sense of logic.
THESIS: Through aspects time variance in jazz music–improvisation, swing, and syncopation–Invisible Man to conveys his narrative.
Jazz enables Invisible Man to toy with a new sense of time, which then allows him to express his narrative.
Invisible Man discovers time while listening to Louis Armstrong’s “What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue?” He finds that “invisibility… gives one a slightly different sense of time” (8).
Invisible Man highlights the differences between his thoughts and those of others as Louis is “unaware that he is invisible.”
The understanding of invisibility allows Invisible Man to better understand how he wants to avoid the oppressive nature of time, and find his variance. He can silently object to the other forms of time while playing his own jazz music tempo.
Invisible Man allows other characters he meets to take time away from his telling of the narrative; therefore, utilizing improvisation.
Trueblood begins to recount his story with how is it in the present day where he “couldn’t git no help from nobody.” However, now “lotta folks is curious and goes outta they way to help” (52).
Trueblood draws his audience in much like a musicians steal the audience’s focus for their solo. Trueblood sang in a jazz quartet, so he is experienced in creating a song. He gently varys time in accordance with his story.
Trueblood begins to dive into his past, dramatically shifting from his current optimistic outlook on the situation or Invisible Man’s tempo. This is as if the narrative suddenly switches from the control of Invisible Man to Trueblood
Trueblood stays on the beat through his solo until he brings up incest for which he describes his daughter as how his wife would look when she was young only better looking (54).
Invisible Man is uncomfortable, and the reader is disturbed, which marks a temporal shift.
He tells his story, solo, in the middle of Invisible Man’s narrative resulting in improvisation.
Invisible Man experiences seemingly unpredictable events in his life, which accent the downbeat while still staying consistent with the steady beat; a variance from the steady beat.
He struggles to find the beat during the story as his “mind was blank, as thought I had just begun to live” (233).
The extreme attention to detail in the hospital scene throws the narrative off beat.
He struggles to find the beat during the story as his “mind was blank, as thought I had just begun to live” (233).
He describes the event as something unpredictable or foreign as he questions the situation, “was he a doctor, factory official, or both? I couldn’t get it; and now he seemed to move back and forth across my field of vision…” (247).
Invisible Man struggles to grasp hold of the event as he accents a different part of the story. The accident occurs offbeat because it was completely unpredictable in the sense of the narrative.
Nearing the end of the novel, Invisible Man realizing that he cannot throw out the bad parts of his narrative because it would have “broken up the music and the dance;” therefore damaging his time variance.
He tells his narrative including parts that accent hypersensitive details in scenes like the hospital. (Possibility).
Invisible Man rejects the steady beat of the narrative to become aware of places where time seemingly stops as if swinging behind.
He remembers a boxing match between a professional and an amateur. The award winning fighter possessed “one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action.” However, soon the ammature knocks the other fighter down with one punch by “stepping inside of his opponent's sense of time (8).
The rejection of the steady beat allows Invisible Man to use jazz music to control time in his narrative.
One can manipulate a stable beat, by lagging ahead or behind, to overthrow something more powerful. Thus Invisible Man will be able to overthrow oppressive powers, such as the skilled boxer, and construct his narrative by following jazz’s swing structure.
During the battle royal, the narrative lingers on the descriptions of the event making it feel like it is on slow motion. Invisible man includes descriptions such as how the ballroom was “foggy with cigar smoke,” which allows the readers to see the scene through explicit details. Then, the blonde stripper slows down the time even more as he describes the “smoke of a hundred cigars clinging to her like the thinnest of veils” (19). Finally, the battle begins, and Invisible Man’s narrative continues to lag behind the beat saying “the smoke was agonizing and there were no rounds, no bells at three minute intervals to relieve our exhaustion” (23).
The smoke is an explicit detail that is included to create a dream-like moment that slows down time.
He using images to allow time to progress in slow motion as he says when he is on an electric rug, “it seemed a whole century would pass before I would roll free.” (28)
The narrative falls behind the steady beat with dream-like moments. The moments feel as if the narrative is taking too much time in one place. He never tells the reader how long the battle lasted, but his descriptions make the reader feel as if it lasted for hours since he hangs onto this scene, or note, much longer than anticipated.
The narrator jumps ahead of the beat, swinging in front of it as he foreshadows events.
In a dream, Invisible Man’s grandfather tells him to “to open his briefcase and read what was inside. He finds multiple envelopes and on the last one his father commands him to read it and open it. The letter reads, “Keep This –Boy Running” (33).
The dream occurs after the battle royal, but later in Invisible Man’s story the president of the college Invisible Man attended, Dr. Bledsoe, makes the dream become a reality when he gives false recommendation letters. Invisible Man does not read them and continues to go from person to person looking for a job. He is swinging in front of the beat by foreshadowing what is to come.
The narrator also speeds up the story to swing in front of the beat, which continues his variance of time.
Instead of describing a scene like he did with the smoke in battle royal, the narrows events at a quick, swift pace. This is shown in the riot at Harlem. Invisible Man runs from Sybil to go to Harlem. Once he is there, he sees four men running toward him. He then jumps out of their way, and “there was a sudden and brilliant suspension of time, like the interval between the last ax stroke and the falling of a tall tree, in which there had been a loud noise followed by silence” (535).
This is as if a musical falls behind a beat but then jumps forward to play in front of it: “time bust and I was down the street” (535).
To jump ahead in time implies speed, but why did he speed up here?
WORKING CONCLUSION: