I just discovered some symbolism from Invisible Man that I hadn't noticed the first time around, but if everyone else already did, then just humor me here. Brother Jack only has one eye. This could be referencing his "blindness" when it comes to the narrator. He doesn't really see the narrator as his own person, rather as a tool with excellent speaking skills and the right amount of pigment in his skin to use him to get some (controlled) amount of equality, (or at least keep up the front that that is what he wants). The narrator is totally invisible to Brother Jack just as he is to everyone else in the novel, but this conceited puffed-up dictator (of an "equality" organization--how ironic) literally cannot see him.
So not only is Brother Jack blind, in a sense, but the narrator finds his habit of popping his eye out in a very Mad-Eye Moody way utterly repulsive. This is an addition to the outlandish and often grotesque images that Ellison enjoys throwing in to knock off any pretense of realism that the reader might have been coming in with.Because he discovers this right about the time that he sees the true nature of the Brotherhood's motives, this scene nicely accentuates his disgust for the inner workings of the organization. How graphic the descriptions of his gross empty eye socket are rounds off the feeling of disgust with a nice side-helping of nausea, just in case the readers weren't feeling quite as upset with the Brotherhood as the narrator was.
You're a crafty man, Ellison.
The glass eye is also a relevant detail: unlike the Reverend Barbee, who recites the ceremonial narrative of the Founder at the college, who is blind and everyone knows it (although, characteristically, it takes the narrator a while longer to figure it out), Jack "hides" his blindness (in one eye) with an eye that looks real but is not. He *appears* to see (and thus the narrator is compelled by his organization's "perceptiveness" and "vision" in their analysis of racial inequality), but only later is it revealed that this "vision" is the product of an illusion.
ReplyDeleteBarbee's blindness aligns him with Homer, the classical "blind bard"/storyteller. (His name is even Homer, right?) Jack's eye was lost in the "line of duty," so he wears it like a badge of honor. But the effect, day to day, is to deceive the narrator into thinking he sees more than he does.
(And, yeah, the empty socket totally grosses the narrator out. It's akin to when he's a little grossed out by Jack's eating habits when they first meet.)