Invisible

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Important Quotations Explained
1. “I’s big and black and I say ‘Yes, suh’ as loudly as any burrhead when it’s convenient, but I’m still the king down here. . . . The only ones I even pretend to please are big white folk, and even those I control more than they control me. . . . That’s my life, telling white folk how to think about the things Iknow about. . . . It’s a nasty deal and I don’t always like it myself. . . . But I’ve made my place in it and I’ll have every Negro in the country hanging on tree limbs by morning if it means staying where I am.”
Explanation for Quotation 1 >>
Dr. Bledsoe speaks these words to the narrator in Chapter 6 while rebuking him for taking Mr. Norton to the less desirable parts of campus. Bledsoeexplains how playing the role of the subservient, fawning black to powerful white men has enabled him to maintain his own position of power and authority over the college. He mockingly lapses into the dialect of uneducated Southern blacks, saying “I’s” instead of “I am.” By playing the role of the “ignorant” black man, Bledsoe has made himself nonthreatening to whites. Bledsoe claims that bytelling white men what they want to hear, he is able to control what they think and thereby control them entirely. His chilling final statement that he would rather see every black man in America lynched than give up his place of authority evidences his single-minded desire to maintain his power.
This quote contributes to the larger development of the novel in several ways. First, it helps to explainBledsoe’s motivation for expelling and betraying the narrator: the narrator has upset Bledsoe’s strategy of dissimulation and deception by giving Norton an uncensored peek into the real lives of the area’s blacks. More important, this speech marks the first of the narrator’s many moments of sudden disenchantment in the novel. As a loyal, naïve adherent of the college’s philosophy, the narrator hasalways considered Bledsoe an admirable exponent of black advancement; his sudden recognition of Bledsoe’s power-hungry, cynical hypocrisy comes as a devastating blow. This disillusionment constitutes the first of many that the narrator suffers as the novel progresses, perhaps most notably at the hands of the Brotherhood.
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2. “Our white is so white you can paint a chunka coal and you’dhave to crack it open with a sledge hammer to prove it wasn’t white clear through.”
Explanation for Quotation 2 >>
Lucius Brockway makes this boast to the narrator in Chapter 10. The narrator has taken a job at the Liberty Paints plant, and Brockway is describing the properties of the “Optic White” paint whose production he supervises. This quote exemplifies Ellison’s use of the LibertyPaints plant as a metaphor. In both Ellison’s descriptions of the paint-mixing process and the relations between blacks and whites in the company, the Liberty Paints plant emerges as a symbol for the racial dynamics in American society. The main property of Optic White, Brockway notes, is its ability to cover up blackness; it can even whiten charcoal, which is often used to make black marks upon—tospoil, in a sense—white paper. This dynamic evokes the larger notion that the white power structure in America, like the white paint, tries to subvert and smother black identity. Prejudice forces black men and women to assimilate to white culture, to mask their true thoughts and feelings in an effort to gain acceptance and tolerance.
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3. . . . the cast-iron figure of a very black, red-lippedand wide-mouthed Negro . . . stared up at me from the floor, his face an enormous grin, his single large black hand held palm up before his chest. It was a bank, a piece of early Americana, the kind of bank which, if a coin is placed in the hand and a lever pressed upon the back, will raise its arm and flip the coin into the grinning mouth.
Explanation for Quotation 3 >>
This passage,...