Invisible Man Prologue - Chapter 7

Please respond to the following with complete, detailed answers. One liners and Fragments will not be counted.

All students will be held accountable in Socratic Fishbowl  4/15

Invisible Man:  Prologue and Chapter One

1.   Explain how the narrator views history, as expressed in the Prologue.

2.   What does it mean to be a “thinker-tinker”?

3.   Explain the following quote:  “Responsibility rests upon recognition and recognition is a form of agreement.”

4.   What is the grandfather’s curse and how is it ironic?

5.   Chapter One, originally published before the rest of the novel as a short story called “Battle Royal,” can be seen as both a rite of passage and as an initiation.  Explain.

6.   Relate the following quote from Ellison’s essay, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” to the story told in Chapter One:

“The Blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.”

Invisible Man:  Prologue - Chapter Seven

1.   Identify each of the following:

      Greenwood

      Burnside

      Matty Lou

      Homer Barbee

      the Founder

      Crenshaw

      Norton

      Trueblood

      the Golden Day

      Tatlock

2.   What is Dr. Bledsoe’s personal philosophy?

3.   Explain why the Invisible Man’s confrontation with Dr. Bledsoe is so devastating for him.

4.   Chapter Seven is generally considered a transitional chapter.  Explain.

5.   Explore the possible meanings of Trueblood’s narrative -- as an inversion of sexual taboos, “puttin’ on the massa” slave tale, racial purity symbolism, pure sexual titillation, truth, lie told to please, etc.