Invisible Man
Chapter Seventeen
1. How is paradox used to express the contradictory constraints placed on the narrator?
2. How might Tod Clifton serve as a more effective spokesman than the narrator, at least in the eyes of Emma?
3. How is humor used in the first introduction of Ras the Exhorter?
4. Why do you think the author chooses to have Ras speak the dialect of a native African learning English?
5. What does Tod Clifton mean when he says that “sometimes a man has to plunge outside history”?
6. How is alliteration used to reflect the instantaneous paradox that memories of the narrator’s grandfather bring
to mind?
Chapter Eighteen
1. Who are “they”? Who will cut the narrator down, according to the letter?
2. How is Brother Tarp’s slave chain-link different from Dr. Bledsoe’s?
3. What does the narrator mean when he says that Brother Wrestrum “snatched [him] back to the South”?
Chapter Nineteen
1. How does the setting of the beginning of the chapter contradict the woman’s tone?
2. How are sound devices used to express the ambivalence the narrator feels about the woman?
3. How is asyndeton used to show the building panic in the narrator’s mind as he leaves the building?
4. Explain the significance of this sentence:
“My nerves were in a state of constant tension, my face took on a stiff, noncommittal expression, beginning to look like Brother Jack’s
and the other leaders’.”
Chapter Twenty
1. Why is there so much resentment toward the narrator in the Jolly Dollar?
2. How did Clifton choose to make his escape from history?
3. How does the author use irony to show how far Clifton had fallen?
4. Explain the significance of this sentence:
They were outside the groove of history, and it was my job to get them in, all of them.
5. What happens right before the end of the chapter to make the narrator realize the significance of his
leadership?
Chapter Twenty-One
1. In the description of the funeral procession, how do the images show the angry pride of the crowd?
2. How is personification used to show the power of the music in the procession?
3. Why is the narrator envious of the old man?
4. How could an old slave song have such power?
5. Is the peanut vendor an allusion to Christ on the cross?
6. How does the narrator use anaphora to make his eulogy more personal?
7. What does the narrator mean when he says that everyone at the funeral is in the box with Tod Clifton?
8. Is there any sign that the narrator is learning that he is dealing with people, rather than a people?
Chapter Twenty-Two
1. What is the reason behind the narrator’s conflict with the Brotherhood?
2. What is the metaphorical value of Brother Jack’s glass eye?
Chapter Twenty-Three
1. How is humor used when the narrator puts on a pair of sunglasses to escape Ras’s goons?
2. Why does Hambro disappoint the narrator?
3. Explain the significance of this sentence:
“If they tolerate Rinehart, then they will forget it and even with them you are invisible.”
4. How has the narrator become invisible?
Chapter Twenty-Four
1. How has the narrator come to adopt one of Dr. Bledsoe’s strategies?
2. How does the narrator use grammar to ridicule Sybil?
Chapter Twenty-Five
1. How does the burning tenement show progress?
2. How is humor used to show Ras’ ridiculousness?
3. What is the rhetorical effect of Ras’ getting hit by a spear?
Epilogue
1. What does the narrator mean when he says he became “ill of affirmation”?
2. How is polysyndeton used to show the inner rage the narrator would feel while affirming others in their
errors?
3. What definition of invisibility spurs the narrator to return to social action?
4. What is the effect of the rhetorical question that ends the novel?

Now I want you to revisit the prologue. I think it will come full circle for you and increase your
understanding of the book.
Prologue
1. How would you describe the tone of the first two paragraphs?
2. What is ironic about the narrator’s encounter with the blond man?
3. What does it mean when the narrator says that the blond man “had not seen [him]”?
4. Who are the “sleeping ones”?
5. Explain the narrator’s desire for light in his hiding place in the basement.
6. What is the relationship between the music of Louis Armstrong and the narrator’s sense of invisibility?
7. What does the narrator learn about the struggle for freedom during his conversation with a former slave?
At the end of the novel:
1. List THREE major themes of the novel and explain your choices.
2. Write down FIVE important quotes that you feel are essential to the meaning of the novel. Explain your
choices.
3. Find three symbolic elements from the book. Explain each one and have 3-5 quotes as support.
4. Identify TWO disturbing aspects of the novel and explain.
5. Using your book, find a poem or song that was referenced and do the following:
--State the poem’s or song’s title: ________________________________________
--Identify meaning/theme.
--Identify tone.
--Identify THREE literary elements and their importance to the poem or song.
--Identify why the author used that particular poem or song
AP Essays
Simulated AP Prompt: Thursday’s prompt
In many works of literature, a character often chooses to allow others to define his or
her identity. This choice often involves an identity crisis, and the character is forced
either to acquiesce to others’ definitions or to find his or her own identity. Choose a
novel where a character is faced with this dilemma and the result. Do not merely
summarize the plot.
You must use:
2 literary terms,
2 allusions,
2 symbols
and
discuss archetypes
Friday’s essay: You are going to choose one of the poem from packet #2
Make sure you understand the poem. Below are some ways that will help you analyze,
understand and write effectively. You need to the appropriate literary terms in this
essay as well.
--Circle and underline important parts of the prompt as you read and analyze it.
--Write in 3rd person, present tense. Put poem’s title in quotation marks.
--Put author’s name and poem’s title in the opening paragraph.
--Establish the meaning of the work as a whole (main lesson/theme) in the opening paragraph.
--Thesis: Place in opening paragraph. “The text shows X in order to show/highlight/accomplish Y.”
--Underline or circle parts as you read. Annotate in the margin.
--Note physical structure of the poem and its importance to the poem’s meaning.
--Title and ending are often the most important parts of poem. Address accordingly.
--One-sentence summary: Jot down immediately after reading the poem.
--Poem’s message: What is it? How does the author deliver that message?
--Tone: Identify tone of poem and any tone shifts that occur, especially at ending. Pay special attention to any
grammar or punctuation changes.
--Irony: Always address irony if it is present and explain its importance to poem’s meaning.
--Address other literary elements and their importance to the poem’s meaning.
--Interweave analysis with summary. Pure summary is death. Support the points you make.
--Do not use line numbers; briefly quote. Don’t give first and last word with ellipsis in between.
--Do not say “The author uses diction” or that “Sentences have syntax.” These are givens.
Get to the point. (Ex. William Blake depicts a blacksmith’s setting for the creation of the
tyger with “furnace,” “anvil,” and “hammer.” Syntactically, William Blake’s “The Fly”
displays an erratic movement of lines that mimic the movement of a fly.)
--Do not write “I liked the poem” or “Shakespeare was a great writer.” Cut to the chase.
--Conclude, even if you only have time for one sentence. Restate your thesis,
emphasize “meaning as a whole” or “significant to the work,” and clinch it.
--Creative writing is not academic writing. Academic writing is analytical writing.
Quotes from Invisible Man
The following quotes are in chronological order.
1. “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”
2. “Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a
death.”
3. “What did I do to be so black and blue?” (quote from Louis Armstrong)
4. “But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man.”
5. “I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having
at one time been ashamed.”
6. “’I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and
destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.’”
7. “’Keep This Nigger-Boy Running.’”
8. “Then in my mind’s eye I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father symbol, his
hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above
the face of a kneeling slave; and I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being
lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient
blinding.”
9. “’He believes in the great false wisdom taught slaves and pragmatists alike, that white is right. I can
tell you his destiny. He’ll do your bidding, and for that his blindness is his chief asset.’” (Vet to Mr.
Norton at the Golden Day)
10. “Here within this quiet greenness (the college) I possessed the only identify I had ever known, and I
was losing it.”
11. “I saw the blinking of sightless eyes. Homer A. Barbee was blind.”
12. “Suddenly he reached for something beneath a pile of papers, an old leg shackle from slavery which
he proudly called a ‘symbol of our progress.’” (Dr. Bledsoe)
13. “Boy, I’m getting rid of you!” (Dr. Bledsoe to narrator)
14. “’You’re nobody, son. You don’t exist—can’t you see that? The white folk tell everybody what to
think—except men like me. I tell them; that’s my life, telling white folk how to think about the things I
know about.’”
15. “’Play the game, but don’t believe in it—that much you owe yourself.’” (Vet on bus to New York talks
to narrator)
16. “’It’s the purest white that can be found. Nobody makes a paint any whiter.’”
17. “Where did my body end and the crystal and white world begin…I seemed to exist in some other
dimension, utterly alone…but still their meanings were lost in the vast whiteness in which I myself was
lost.”
18. “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”
19. “Something had been working fiercely inside me, and for a moment I had forgotten the rest of the
crowd…as though we were all unwilling intruders upon some shameful event…” (narrator at eviction)
20. “’Let’s put it this way,’ he said. ‘How would you like to be the new Booker T. Washington?’”
21. “There near the door I saw something which I’d never noticed there before: the cast-iron figure of a
very black, red-lipped and wide-mouthed Negro…it was a bank.”
22. “I thought of Bledsoe and Norton and what they had done. By kicking me into the dark they’d made
me see the possibility of achieving something greater and more important than I’d ever dreamed.”
23. “Such was the short bitter life of Brother Tod Clifton.”
24. “A glass eye…blindness; he doesn’t see me. He doesn’t even see me.”
25. “Some of me, too, had died with Tod Clifton.”
26. “And now I looked around a corner of my mind and saw Jack and Norton and Emerson merge into
one single white figure. They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality
upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me. I was simply a material, a natural
resource to be used…and it all came out the same—except I now recognized my invisibility.”
27. “The end was in the beginning.”
28. “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”
Reflective Writing on Quotes
*Choose what you feel to be the three most important quotes and complete the following.
1. Write the quote.
2. Interpret the quote as you feel it applies to Invisible Man.
3. Interpret the quote on a personal level.