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Ian Frey
Ms. Mullin
AP Literature and Composition
13 January 2015
Lessons From Invisible Man: Listen to Your Subconscious
We are incapable of understanding the depth of our brain's abilities. There exists a great
rift between what our brains know and what our minds our capable of accessing (Eagleman). Our
brains work 24 hours a day, processing information and executing motor functions. "You are not
consciously aware of the vast majority of your brain’s ongoing activities, nor would you want to
be – it would interfere with the brain’s well oiled processes" (Eagleman). When we delve into
the brain’s subconscious, what we find is surprisingly coherent. When the brain is given free
reign and full power, the results can often lead us to conclusions that we would not develop in
the lucid state. In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, dreams and the subconscious facilitate the
narrator’s major realizations. Through these experiences, the narrator develops a greater sense of
himself and his surroundings. Though one may expect a clear-cut dream to be more telling, we
should pay more attention to the subconscious. Oftentimes, dreams are ambiguous and irrelevant,
especially as told by Ellison. In Invisible Man, the less vivid but more abstract subconscious of
the narrator proves to be more powerful and telling than his lucid dreams.
An easy way to distinguish between the narrator’s subconscious state and dreaming state
is the element of sleep. He dreams while he is asleep, and his mind wanders while he is awake.
He may not be fully lucid or sober in the subconscious, but his brain is still fully active,
processing and solving the events and problems he faced during the day. Because only a tiny
fraction of the brain is dedicated to conscious behavior, the unconscious workings of the brain
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are often overlooked. However, "their influence often trumps conscious thought" (Eagleman).
While dreaming, the mind is not in the moment. Dreams are multiplied versions of reality. They
occur with the brain in a resting state, and the individual cannot process them in the moment. It is
very easy to forget our dreams, or recognize a revelation within them. They are renderings of our
multiple personalities that we practice everyday, being around different people and in different
situations, making it exceedingly difficult to define the self. Dreams end up being more abstract
than the subconscious. Dreams are ambiguous, difficult to remember, and suggest multiple
interpretations. They can be revealing, and help us to process our daily lives, but do not have the
depth of meaning that the subconscious does. As a result, when we look at elements of
consciousness, dreams should not be overanalyzed (Abrams).
A primary example of the active subconscious in Invisible Man occurs in the prologue,
when the narrator smokes a reefer and proceeds to listen to “Black and Blue” by Louis
Armstrong. In his altered stupor, the narrator hallucinates about a slave woman, forced to poison
her white master, the father of her two sons, after she realizes that her sons are plotting to kill
him. The narrator then contemplates Armstrong’s meaning and motivation behind “Black and
Blue”, such a somber piece of music. “At first I was afraid; this familiar music had demanded
action, the kind of which I was incapable, and yet had I lingered there beneath the surface I
might have attempted to act. Nevertheless, I now know that few really listen to this music”
(Ellison 12). In this state of subconscious, the narrator recognizes the fire behind the fight of his
race. He is deciphering messages from a piece of music and his subconscious is actively working
to understand his surroundings. The scene embeds roots in the novel of the narrator’s underlying
motivation for essentially writing this book. He knows that his race has had a difficult past, and
he knows that his race is not listened to. He is ready to channel that pain that Louis sings about
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into today’s action. The narrator also questions what he defines as freedom. “’Old woman, what
is this freedom you love so well?’ I asked around the corner of my mind” (Ellison 11). When he
is not given an answer, the narrator realizes that his freedom is whatever he defines it to be.
A second example of the narrator in a semi-conscious state occurs when he awakes from
the paint factory explosion and believes he is undergoing a lobotomy. The scene, which parallels
a rebirth, contains elements that the narrator cannot distinguish between being real and figments
of his imagination. “I tried to remember how I've gotten here, but nothing came. My mind was
blank, as though I had just begun to live” (Ellison 233). The narrator's experience is surreal, yet
we are still able to witness some powerful underlying messages. “And suddenly my
bewilderment suspended and I wanted to be angry, murderously angry. But somehow the pulse
of current smashing through my body prevented me. Something had been disconnected” (Ellison
237). Here the narrator experiences a rebirth of his personality. He no longer feels the need to
use violence in his fight and now sees his ability to use the eloquence of word and thought. This
entire scene reflects a total change in the personality of the narrator whose outlook is altered,
regardless of the reality of hospital scene. This scene, in which the narrator is semi-conscious, is
an example of how deep his thinking can be, even when he isn’t fully aware of what is
happening around him. He would not be able to make these realizations in his dreams.
When the narrator does dream, the scenes in his head are surely related to his daily life,
but are also ambiguous and rather unclear. Rather than fountains of hidden meaning and
significance, dreams are Ellison’s tool for evoking emotion in both the Invisible Man and the
reader. The narrator’s first dream in the novel occurs in the first chapter. The narrator dreams
that he takes his grandfather to the circus, and his grandfather refuses to laugh at the clowns, no
matter what they do. The dream occurs the night after the narrator fights at the Battle Royale and
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gives his graduation speech to a horde of racist white men, who give him a briefcase and a
college scholarship. He imagines himself opening the briefcase to find envelopes, which contain
even more envelopes. Finally he discovers a letter. “’To whom it may concern,’ I intoned. ‘Keep
This Nigger Boy Running.’ I awoke with the old man's laughter ringing in my ears” (Ellison 33).
In this case, this dream foreshadows a future event in the book. After he is kicked out of college,
the narrator is sent to search for a job in New York by Dr. Bledsoe, whose letters of
recommendation instruct the reader to not give him a job but “keep him running”. The narrator
also explains that he cannot grasp the meaning of his dream. “It was a dream I was to remember
and dream again for many years after. But at that time I had no insight into its meaning. First I
had to attend college” (Ellison 33). His grandfather’s dying words have haunted him for all of his
youth. The meaning behind his words are ambiguous and although he knows that his grandfather
did not trust white people, he does not know how he should act. This is cause for mental unrest
in the narrator, whose dreams provide him further discomfort and obscure his understanding of
his grandfather. The narrator’s second dream occurs in the final chapter, when he is trapped
underground, hiding from the riots on the street, and upon discovering that Brother Jack was the
one who sent him the anonymous letter earlier in the book, he falls into a fit of rage and then
sleeps. In his dream, a group consisting of Jack, Emerson, Bledsoe, Norton, Ras, The
superintendent, and “a number of others whom I failed to recognize, but all of whom had run
me” castrate him. “And while the others laughed, before my pain-sharpened eyes the whole
world was slowly turning red” (Ellison 569). The narrator then proceeds to laugh, realizing that
all of these people are components of the corrupt white power structure. He then explains that his
castration is the only significant accomplishment that these people will make. “There's your
universe, and that drip-drop upon the water you here is all the history is made, all you're going to
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make” (Ellison 570). He sees that all along, these people have been obstacles in his path to
success and visibility. Because over the years they have provided him with such strife and unrest,
he now views them as insignificant. They have invoked powerful emotional response from the
narrator over the years and in his dream they are simply figments of his emotion. The narrator’s
mind creates the scenarios as a way to process his frustrations. The meaning behind the scene is
especially ambiguous because each of these characters provided him with a different source of
discomfort. In Invisible Man, the narrator descends “’into the deeper level of his consciousness,’
opening himself to an ‘inner world where reason and madness mingle with hope and memory
and endlessly give birth to nightmare and to dream’” (Abrams 592). They are products of
emotion and a working mind. They allow him to process his emotion, but rarely lead him to a
powerful revelation. While throughout the novel the narrator seeks to define himself, these
dreams further obscure the idea of a single identity. Not everything that the narrator sees goes
together, including his personality, so these dreams should not be interpreted in a Freudian
manner. “To peer down into the depths of dream in Ellison's novel, then, is to gaze into a
contradictory and equivocating world reflecting back to waking reason [the mystery of human
subjectivity]” (Abrams 599). Ellison's purpose for providing these dreams in the story is not for
us to pick through them, analyzing every word trying to string together some sort of significant
meaning or message. He includes them, as they shape the novel into a powerful, emotional piece
of writing.
While both dreams and the subconscious play major roles throughout Ellison’s Invisible
Man, the subconscious provides us with a greater wealth of meaning. The narrator is incapable of
recognizing the ability of his brain. His most important revelations come not from lucid thought,
but when he is in the subconscious. He identifies the fire behind the fight of the black race while
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listening to music, and during his lobotomy he develops his plan to combat white power and
discrimination. Through these experiences, the narrator is better able to grasp himself and his
surroundings. The images are less vivid, and contain less emotion than his nocturnal dreams, but
some of the narrator’s most important realizations come to him in the subconscious.
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Works Cited
Abrams, Robert E. "The Ambiguities of Dreaming in Ellison's Invisible Man." American
Literature 49.4 (1978): 592-603. JSTOR. Web. 9 Jan. 2015.
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/2924776>.
Eagleman, David. "Your Brain Knows a Lot More Than You Realize." Discover 27 Oct. 2011: n.
pag. Science in Context. Web. 12 Jan. 2015.
<http://ic.galegroup.com/ic/scic/MagazinesDetailsPage/MagazinesDetailsWindow?failOv
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mark&u=nysl_ca_sara&jsid=c846faa24ea158bac412c074c74b9f87>.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952. Print.