And yet I am what they think I am...

Maybe the reason the character in Invisible Man doesn't give us a name goes deeper than simply adding an air of mystery and possibility to himself.  It could be that he doesn't want a name attached to him due to the way his identity is constantly changing.  Or it could be the reverse: he doesn't want a name attached to him to define his identity.

The further I read, the more I'm stunned by his impressionability.  Wherever he ends up somewhere new, he says, Look! Here I am! I'm my own, brand new person! (as we roll our eyes at his naivete).  He does this at the college.  He does this at the factory.  He does this when he joins the Brotherhood.  But what the narrator thinks is his own decision is always suggested - or controlled - first by someone else.  The ideal thing to do would be to take those suggestions, compare them with common sense, then form individual opinions based on that skeptical view.  The narrator, however, is missing the strategy behind all this.  He only sees the surface.  He believes the mask is all there is.

His mask changes to suit his environment, though.  This is why he is so bothered by his grandfather's words.  He can't see that the way people act is different from the way people are.  Everywhere he goes, he adapts to what the people there want him to be.  At the college, he is so unbelievably obedient that he takes Norton absolutely everywhere he wants to go.  Bledsoe then throws the narrator off by saying he should be telling lies.  The narrator gets confused and leaves.  In New York, he takes a job, believing that he had made the move (195).  In reality, Emerson had recommended it.  After the "accident" there, the narrator makes one of his famous speeches and gets noticed by Brother Jack.  Asserting his "free will" once again, he calls up Brother Jack for the job (ahem, which was offered to him).  After all, he does need the money to pay back Mary.  Then we get to his big mask change.

Our nameless narrator is given a new name, a new personality, a new life, and is instructed to adopt it as his own.  There are warning bells going off everywhere.  He's just a puppet here!  They've dressed him up in doll clothes, given him a Barbie Dream House, told him what to read and what to believe.  The narrator accepts this as his identity.  He becomes the person he's supposed to be playing.

There's a Doctor Who episode called "The Shakespeare Code" which is more or less about the importance of words.  When the right words are said, when things are named, the monsters lose their power.  Unless of course the monsters are the ones saying the names, in which case they hold the power.  Likewise in the Eragon book series, true names mean complete control. (Is it frowned upon to make two outside references in a row? Too bad.)  The ancient language, which is the set of words that make up magical spells, uses true names of plants, animals, and even humans to manipulate those objects to the spellcaster's will.

Ellison's narrator seems to be so impressionable that he needs to remain elusive to avoid being manipulated by the reader.  He says, "they believe that to call a thing by name is to make it so.  And yet I am what they think I am" (379).  When you call someone by a name, you identify that person with the name.  You see the name as who the person is.  The other characters in the novel change the narrator's identity by changing or redefining his name.  By not giving the readers a name for the narrator, it adds to the significance a name has over him.  By not giving us a name, the man who is telling the story, the Invisible Man of the prologue, is saying he can't be controlled by us.

The City Dreams Itself Awake

A dream is a series of imagined events occurring during sleep.  And how do we sleep? With our eyes closed to our surroundings.  Therefore a dream is more or less an imaginary life that takes place as we ignore our surroundings.  Then in "The Circus of the City," what does this definition make Crazy Mary?  The lucid dreamer?  She "dreams the city while she's awake" with "her hands orchestrating."  This poem is saying that Mary, the different one, is the awake one.  She's the only one who knows it's all a dream, and thus she is able to control it.  While Mary is awake, she dreams of the city.  The city dreams itself to life.  Without the dream, the city hasn't a shred of existence.

Likewise, the notion of a dream is played with many times in Ellison's Invisible Man.  In order to more fully comprehend this elusive idea of a dream, I'm going to go back to the beginning of the book, to all the big scenes that emphasize this metaphor.  And I think the best way to do this is to start with the most vivid, most remembered form of dreaming: a nightmare.

Keep this boy running.

Remember the Battle Royal?  After an entire night of humiliation, our narrator stands up to give a speech to a crowd where nobody's listening.  This isn't all that different from the oh-so-common nightmare of showing up somewhere without clothes on; they're both unbearably humiliating once realized.  But then he gets a scholarship. Oh good, I knew this would be worth it.

Keep this boy running.

Laughter.  It's all a joke.  But seriously now, it's time for college.

"I've closed my eyes" (34).  This college, too good to be true for him it seems, is his fantasy.  At the beginning of chapter two, the narrator tells us how he walks around the campus with his eyes closed and imagines.  Then he's given the glorious, fantastic opportunity to drive around Mr. Norton.  Mr. Norton's stories are thought provoking and confusing to the narrator.  As he daydreams - driving "half-consciously" - he winds up taking Norton to the quarters, running into Trueblood, and ultimately ending up in the Golden Day (46).  Perhaps I'm taking this analogy too far, but could it be that when you dream inside the dream, you dream up reality?

Keep this boy running.

Now we move onto Mr. Norton.  A "trustee of consciousness" as he's described by the vet (89).  The way I interpreted this mysterious little title was quite literal.  A trustee is most simply someone who's trusted with power or control over something, and Mr. Norton is trusted with consciousness.  Crazy Mary is a trustee of consciousness, and she knows it.  Norton doesn't see the problem with living in his dream.  In fact, he fully owns up to it!  Norton knew what the place was like before the college came to life.  He even describes it as "a great dream become reality" (38).  The problem is that Norton sees his dream as his reality, rather than recognizing it as what it is: a dream.  This directly contradicts what wise Mary warns the narrator of in chapter 12: "I'm in New York, but New York ain't in me, understand what I mean?"  Here's where the dream changes.

Keep this boy running.

"I turned and watched it recede.... Then it was gone.... lost within the wild uncultivated countryside" (156).  The illusion has faded, and now the truth is left.  All that's between the college and New York, one dream to another, is nothing but truth.  Truth and the vet.  But on the bus the narrator daydreams.  He dreams of meeting important people, going to nice parties, returning to the college.  "I dreamed with my eyes gazing blankly upon the landscape" (157).  With his eyes gazing blankly upon the truth.

Keep this boy running.

Disillusionment.  With the help of Emerson, the narrator's old dreams have cracked.  It could be debated whether the narrator's really improved or if he's substituted in a new dream without realizing it, but that's beside the point.  The important part in his development is that the narrator can now see the grey in the white paint.  In chapter 14 when the narrator is sitting down for coffee with Brother Jack, he remarks to himself that he feels "somehow [Jack] was acting a part; that something about him wasn't exactly real" (288).  Later, the narrator somewhat indirectly describes his new situation to Mary as a "mixed-up dream" (326).  But the key factor is that he can finally identify what's dream and what's reality.  He talks about having a "contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream" (256).  At last.  We see our narrator unveiling his prologue personality.

Please hope him to death, and keep him running.

Do you understand?

I'm beginning to.

 

"But you don't even know my name."

Last night, I went to see the movie The Words, and I thought one of the most interesting things about it was that the old man was never given a name.  As both Sierra and Ted touched on in their posts, the factor of being without a name gives an air of mystery.  That person can be whomever you want him to be.

What's happening in this clip is that Rory, the main character, is being confronted by the previously unknown old man.  The aspiring writer Rory had found the manuscript of a novel (which turned out to have been written by the old man) and claimed it as his own.

Leading up to this scene, the man's following Rory around town, essentially stalking him, but he seems invisible; Rory doesn't even notice him!  After all, it's not anyone he knows or cares about.  This man is just another face on the street, as the narrator of Invisible Man is just another mark on what Mr. Norton considers to be his fate.

What's fascinating about this scene is the way Rory gets up and walks away out of discomfort when the old man begins to tell his story.  He doesn't have the slightest desire to see underneath to who this man is, to this man's story.  It's not until the old man mentions the stolen book - the part that directly involves Rory - that he turns around and listens.

While he turns around though, it is easy to tell Rory looks terrified.  Why is this?  Perhaps, subconsciously, is our invisibility so ingrained in us that we're shocked to find that someone knows something deeper about us?  We're such a self-centered society that it's startling to us when a person outside ourself tries to dig deeper.  It would just make sense to be ignored, since we're so used to ignoring.

Often we're so used to being a nameless face on the street.  But when a writer chooses to draw a character without a name, such as in The Words and Invisible Man, their blur and mystery is emphasized even further.  The nameless aren't seen past the face, nor are they even desired to be.  Each one of us has a story.  But who really longs to hear it?  You could have been born to a family of birds in Paraguay for all I know.  A face without a name has fuzzy edges and many possibilities.  Characters like this bring about questions of our own identity.  In a way, aren't we all nameless?