He does everything from set buildings on fire to rob and murder.Ī man who spends most of his time by himself and lives on the street. Rather than using his brilliance for good, he uses it to further his own selfish desires. He only cares about what science can bring him monetarily and fame-wise. Throughout the novel, he’s selfish and cruel. This is something that he works to remedy throughout the novella and which eventually drives him to madness and a life of crime. Unfortunately for him, his formula does work, and he’s rendered invisible. Griffin tests out his formula on himself, thinking only of the ways he could use his invisibility to entertain himself and gain wealth (and not considering the consequences). He spends his time studying formulas that could possibly render human tissue invisible. He became interested in the refractive indexes of tissues. He’s a scientist and college student who was born with albinism. Griffin is the main character and antagonist of the novel. Major Characters in The Invisible Man Griffin – The Invisible Man (also known as “The Stranger”) He goes from misguided, curious science student to murderer over the space of the novel’s pages, a transformation that makes more sense as one considers the mental deterioration Griffin suffers after becoming invisible. Thus the novel can be read not only as a story about a black man’s struggle against racism, but a black man’s struggle to grow up and learn to be himself, against the backdrop of intense social pressures, racism among others.The main character of the novel, Griffin, also serves as the novel’s protagonist. However, he comes to discover that the Brotherhood is perfectly willing to sacrifice him for its own potentially flawed ends. When the narrator first meets Brother Jack, Jack says, “You mustn’t waste your emotions on individuals, they don’t count.” At first, the narrator embraces this ideology of the Brotherhood and structures his identity around it. The Brotherhood provides a systematic way of thinking about the world that claims to be the solution to racism and inequality. However, it is the Brotherhood, a thinly veiled take on the Communist Party, that proves to be most disillusioning for the narrator. This is true for the narrator both at the unnamed black university and at Liberty Paints. Just as poisonous for the narrator are other generalized ways of thinking about identity-ideas that envision him as a cog in a machine instead of a unique individual. However, invisibility doesn’t come from racism alone. Ultimately, the narrator is forced to retreat to his hole, siphoning off the light from the white-owned power company, itself a symbol of an underground resistance that may go unacknowledged for a long time. The narrator recognizes his invisibility slowly-in moments like the hospital machine, when he realizes he is being asked to respond to the question of who he is in terms of his blackness. Ellison implies that if racists really saw their victims, they would not act the way they do. For others in the novel, it is simply convenient to define the narrator through his blackness.Įllison’s narrator explains that the outcome of this is a phenomenon he calls “invisibility”-the idea that he is simply “not seen” by his oppressors. As the narrator states at the novel’s beginning, “All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned somebody tried to tell me what it was.” It is undoubtedly clear that the narrator’s blackness comprises a large part of his identity, although this isn’t something he has necessarily chosen. Invisible Man is the story of a young man searching for his identity, unsure about where to turn to define himself.
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