The Blue Room

  Sharecropper  by Elizabeth Catlett (1952) In recent chapters of Invisible Man , the narrator has called his identity into question. As his consciousness has developed (and since he had a lobotomy-like medical procedure performed on him), he has begun to question who he is and the anxieties which seemed to define his consciousness earlier in the novel. A particular aspect of the narrator’s identity which has also been discussed in recent chapters is that of his southern roots. The narrator initially seems ashamed of his southern identity. We see this most clearly in the scene where he goes into a diner, and proudly denies the server’s suggestion that he would like a traditional southern breakfast. The narrator thinks to himself, “Could everyone see that I was southern?”, clearly self-conscious about being perceived as southern, and views his ordering of an orange juice, toast, and coffee as “an act of discipline, a sign of the change that was coming over me and which would ...

Portrait of a Young Woman - artist unknown, late 18th century                The blind spot in Native Son most discussed in class was that of the book’s representation of Bessie and black women as a whole, and whether this representation is effective in its depiction of the experiences of black women. To make a blanket statement, none of the women in Native Son are developed enough as characters to be depicted as full, well-rounded people. However, Bessie gets the brunt of this flat representation as she is objectified, dehumanized, and devalued by Bigger throughout the book, and then is literally treated as an object as her body is brought out as evidence in court for the murder of a white woman. I think it can be argued that there are reasons for this lacking depiction of Bessie, but I do not think that this novel is at all an effective representation of what it is like to be a black woman.        ...