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.
Wow--this is great. You could probably assemble a long and detailed essay exploring all of the ways that dream language is used to characterize the narrator's waking reality throughout the novel. In some cases, the "dream" comments on the surreal reality in penetrating and insightful ways (i.e. the grandfather), but the fact that it's a dream allows the narrator to shrug it off in his waking life ("it was only a dream").
ReplyDeleteAdd to this the way(s) that the narrative itself is so dreamlike so often--Ellison's fictional reality, as we've noted so often in class, has some of the distortion, hyperbole, and ambiguity combined with the perpetual suggestion of depper significance that we associate with dreams. All of chapter 15, for example (which opens with the narrator describing himself as "awake and not awake"), resembles certain dreams where a task is interrupted by some other absurd task (getting rid of the smashed bank), which itself keeps getting interrupted by absurd obstacles. The sense we have that everything in the narrative seems to signify on a deeper level is itself a kind of dream-aesthetic.
I thought it was interesting that some of the quotes you used I thought could be compared to the sight recurring metaphor. I never thought of these sections in terms of dreaming and I also thought it appropriate to add the grandfather quote periodically. Going along with the sight and dreaming metaphors, I think they go together. The reason the narrator ended up at Trueblood's was because he wasn't paying attention. He was daydreaming and didn't see where he was going. I think that could be applied to all that's going on in Invisible Man. The narrator goes along dreaming about other things or just seeing the world as if through a daydream and doesn't actually SEE (sorry there are no italics or underlining) what's going on. Perhaps someone or something will slap him awake.
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