Invisible Man Chapter 15 - 19

The protagonist is woken by someone banging their pipes in protest of the heat being shut off, and he angrily decides to retaliate by hitting the pipes himself. He finds a cast iron bank in the shape of a black man that grins when a coin is put into it. The bank causes him severe anger and he wonders how Mary could bear to have such a thing in her home. He hits the pipes with the bank and it shatters into several pieces. The noise brings Mary to his room, but he becomes ashamed of the broken bank and hurriedly hides the pieces. He gives Mary a hundred dollars over breakfast as he explains that he will be leaving, but she refuses to take it at first as she tells him not to worry about the rent. She asks him whether he had won the money in a lottery, and he tells her that he had, unwilling to tell her of his work with Jack. A surge of cockroaches enter the kitchen as they are expelled from the pipes by the continuous banging, and the protagonist helps Mary kill the bugs before heading out. In the streets, he attempts twice to get rid of the package with the pieces of the broken bank, but he is prevented both times. A black woman prevents him from throwing his package into her trash, and a black man chases him down to return the package when he leaves it in the snow.

The narrator notices a man reading a newspaper that features the story of a riot in Harlem that he had instigated, and he finds his mood uplifted when he reads the story in the newspaper. He buys himself an expensive suit and makes his way to a new apartment whose landlady is a member of the brotherhood. She tells him that there are pamphlets and books for him to look over, and the protagonist bathes in his new home before putting on his new clothes. He notices the package with the broken bank pieces and decides to dispose of it later as he focusses on preparing for a rally later that night.

The protagonist heads to a filled stadium in Harlem with Jack, and other members of the brotherhood in a taxi. Jack tells the protagonist to listen carefully to all the speakers as he informs the protagonist that he would be the last to speak. The protagonist remembers a burned stadium from his childhood and the syphilitic man with the horrifying hand that had lived near the stadium. The protagonist is overwhelmed by the crowd when he is brought onto the stage with the other speakers and fails to remember phrases from the other speakers of the night. He recalls a dog called Master that his family had owned in his childhood, as he recalls that he had been afraid of the dog even when it was chained to a tree.

The protagonist is brought onto the stage and does a poor job of making his speech at first, but the applause he receives causes him to remember he and the people in the crowd are on the same side. He lets his emotions move through him as he talks passionately of social dispossession. He describes a metaphor in which two one-eyed men fought one another without realizing that there was a third man who had instigated their fight. Jack fiercely whispers to the protagonist that he should not make himself unusable to the brotherhood so early in his career. The protagonist continues with his speech and he is moved to tears as he talks to the people. Some members of the brotherhood loudly congratulate him about his speech, but the Brotherhood committee is critical of the speech. They criticize the speech for being reactionary, emotional, and unscientific. The committee decides to keep the protagonist out of the public eye while they educate him about the standards of party rhetoric. Contrary to the opinion of the committee members, the protagonist is proud of his speech as he feels that he was able to connect with the people.

The protagonist spends four months learning about the party ideology from Brother Hanbro and attending brotherhood rallies in the nights. He doesn’t see Brother Jack often, but Jack comes to pick him up after he has spent a sufficient amount of time learning the party fundamentals. They go to a local bar called El Toro, where Jack informs the protagonist that he has been made the chief spokesperson of the brotherhood’s Harlem chapter. Jack tells him to learn the theory of the party but not to overdo it, since theory needs to be balanced with action. He charges the protagonist to increase the participation of the Harlem people in the brotherhood, and then he takes the protagonist to the offices of the Harlem chapter, where they meet Brother Tarp, an old and established member of the organization.

The protagonist attends a meeting with Brother Jack and the other members of the chapter which includes a young and handsome black man called Tod Clifton. Clifton arrives late to the meeting and explains that he had been kept away due to a conflict with Ras The Exhorter. The narrator learns that the vocally violent man he had first heard at the civil rights protest on his first day in Harlem had been Ras. The other members inform him that Ras is a separatist who believes in the superiority of the black race and so believes that the black men in the brotherhood are betraying their race by working with white people. The narrator suggests that they focus on the issue of evictions, and raise support through community leaders of Harlem with that issue. He receives support from Clifton, and the protagonist begins to develop a good working relationship with the young brother. Jack departs the chapter after reminding Clifton that the Brotherhood is non-violent, and the protagonist is left to lead and organize the team.

The narrator makes a speech to a crowd while standing on a ladder, but the crowd is soon infiltrated by Ras and his gang. Clifton notices their arrival and asks the protagonist if he knows how to use his fists when violence breaks out in the crowd. The streetlights go dark during the confrontation plunging them all into the darkness, but the Protagonist manages to fight off his attacker and goes out to aid Clifton who is overpowered by Ras. Ras pulls out a knife but is unable to bring himself to use it on Clifton as he is reduced to tears at the prospect of killing a black man. He exhorts both the protagonist and Clifton as he tells them that nothing good can come from their cooperation with the brotherhood. Clifton and the protagonist form a united front as they inform him that they would be continuing to do their work in Harlem without fearing his attacks.

The next day, Brother Tarp gifts the protagonist a picture of Fredrick Douglas and hopes that the protagonist would just gaze at it a few times. Over the next few weeks, the brotherhood gains the support of the local community leaders and his renown grows throughout the neighborhood. The protagonist is highly amused when the owner of the Men’s house begins to treat him reverentially, and he organizes a parade to celebrate the role of the brotherhood in the community.

The protagonist receives an anonymous note that warns him to not go too fast since the world belonged to the white man who could cut the protagonist down if he were to become a problem. The protagonist is quite upset with the letter and calls Brother Tarp into his office. He discusses the letter with the brother, who reassures him that members of the organization were happy with his work. The older black man shares his story of being in a chain gang for nineteen years and escaping his confinement by faking his death. The man shares with the narrator an untwisted link from his chain, calling it a luck piece, and shares it with the protagonist who accepts it reluctantly since it reminds him of fathers passing on watches to their sons. Brother Wrestrum, a large black man, comes into the office after Brother Tarp leaves, and he becomes upset upon seeing the untwisted piece of metal. He dives into a long tirade about the negative influence of symbols like the chain-link as it emphasised the difference between the black and white members of the organization. He claims that he cleanses himself daily of all behavior that goes against the organization, but becomes upset when the protagonist compares his attitude to religious zeal. The protagonist receives a call from a magazine that wishes to interview him, and he accepts the interview to spite Brother Wrestrum who is eagerly listening to his phone conversation.

The protagonist is summoned to a meeting with the Brotherhood committee where he is surprised to discover that Brother Wrestrum has accused him of using his party office for personal gain. The jealous man provides the committee with the magazine interview as proof in claims that the protagonist had failed to discuss the brotherhood and further accuses the protagonist of being a dictator. The committee discusses the matter in private and concludes that the interview is harmless, but decides to investigate the matter more deeply. The protagonist berates Brother Wrestrum for lying and being a scoundrel, but Jack defends Wrestrum claiming that he had the organization’s best interest at heart. The committee doesn’t explain why they are investigating the protagonist but repeats the same phrase over and over again, that the organization had many enemies. The protagonist elects to take another assignment rather than being inactive, and so he is assigned to the downtown chapter where he would be working on women’s issues.

The protagonist begins his speeches on the women’s question and receives a lot of attention from women right after the first speech. A white woman invites him to her apartment over for coffee to discuss the brotherhood’s ideology. He arrives at the woman’s apartment to find her dressed in a beautiful dress, and the offer of coffee transforms into one of wine. The woman claims that she finds his voice to be alluring for its primitiveness, and informs him that her husband is away for work. She inches close to him when he talks, and they soon end up in bed. The protagonist wakes to find the woman talking casually to the man in the room’s doorway, who asks her to wake him early the next morning. The narrator is horrified as he thinks the man is the woman’s husband, but the man does not find the presence of a strange man in his wife’s bed alarming. The protagonist hurries out of the house and begins to fear that the events of the night had been set up since the man in the doorway had reminded him of someone in the neighborhood. He continues his work on the women’s issue and suddenly receives a summons to an emergency meeting of the brotherhood. He arrives late fearing that the meeting is either about Wrestrum’s accusations or his recent sexual dalliance. He is surprised to learn that Brother Clifton has disappeared and the protagonist is now required to return to the Harlem chapter to combat the growing popularity of Ras.

Analysis

The racist bank shaped in the form of a black man serves as a poignant symbol for the narrator and though he manages to smash it into pieces claiming it to be an insulting item, he still has to carry its pieces in the briefcase that he had been awarded along with his scholarship. The bank perhaps reminds the narrator that the bank reminds him of his fall to an ideological low by agreeing to be the spokesperson of an organization like the brotherhood. It is also interesting to observe that he attempts to get rid of the remains of the bank yet he finds himself unable to do so, as he is prevented each time by a black individual. The narrator's first speech is about an extended metaphor for blindness and it is made all the more ironic by his inability to see his own audience, composed of persons he claims to represent. His stumble on the stage is reminiscent of the speech about the founder that the blind Reverend Barbee had made at the chapel in his college.

The narrator is criticized for speaking emotionally to the audience by the committee members who condone a more 'scientific' vocabulary. They decide to have him trained by a more senior member of the Brotherhood, and the narrator fails to recognize that this pattern of education mirrors his pursuit of a college education one that he had abandoned. The author represents the futility of the conflict between the narrator's group and Ras's gang when the narrator finds himself unable to differentiate between the two groups during the fight in the rally. Both groups are working towards the empowerment of black people and yet choose to fight one another.