I am SO close to being done with Invisible Man, but before I was anywhere close to finishing IM I was talking to Lisa Fu (who had finished it) and she told me she wasn't exactly sure if she liked it, but it did come around to a full circle, and now I'm starting to see what she means as I am reflecting on the past pages. But what I really found interesting was the fact the main character never creates his own identity, but only takes the ones people give him. For example, Brother Jack gave him his first identity, and when Jack took that one away then people on the street gave him Rineheart. It was as if he was never born with a name. This could be going on about the slave-mentality and how slaves many times wouldn't even be given names. If a slave was given a name, it would be given by their superiors, not by their mothers and it would be a sense of entitlement, not because it is a right. So basically, the main character is a slave to society and has no true self. There is only society.

               But there are also things I do not like about Invisible Man, such as the chain metaphor. Though I understand it probably means something deep and amazing and genius, the symbol has not yet kicked with me. Does it mean that something is still chaining the main character to the South? Is Ellison trying to say that the chain has a figurative curse on it and you must get rid of that chain in order to be something? It's hard to tell, which is why I am struggling with it. I also kind of wanted someone to rescue the main character. From the beginning, any reader could tell that the brotherhood was corrupted, which was terrible because the main character is abnormally innocent. In a way, Clifton could have been his hero because Clifton showed him the truth, but Clifton's death also brought upon corruption, so it's debatable. In the beginning I thought Mary could have been the hero, because Mary (I've been assuming at least) is based off of Mother Mary from the bible, but the main character leaves her. So what? What could be the main character's hero? And then when it dawned on me that maybe he didn't have one, it bothered me. The main character HAS to have some sort've hero, doesn't he? Of course, a protagonist must be his/her own hero, but doesn't even hero have a safety net? Like Severus Snape being Harry's (secret) hero, or Prim being Katniss' innocent hero? Is this the reason that the main character is evil by the end? because he doesn't have a hero? Jack is corrupted, Clifton is dead, Ras is a destroyer, Mary is gone, Bledsoe is a traitor. Theres nobody that is willing to save him.