Invisible Man - Epilogue

hello and welcome back to micah reads today we are going to be finishing invisible man by ralph ellison the final chapter or the epilogue as it is called see it says epilogue right here so there you have it of it oh so there you have all of it that's important or at least you almost have it i'm an invisible man and it placed me in a hole or showed me a hole that i was in if you will and i reluctantly accepted that fact what else could i have done once you get used to it reality is irresistible as a club and i was clubbed into the cellar before i caught the hint perhaps that's the way it had to be i don't know nor do i know whether accepting the lesson has placed me in the rear or in the avant-garde that perhaps is a lesson for history and i'll leave each such discussions to jack and his ilk while i try belatedly to study the lesson of my own life let me be honest with you a feat which by the way i find of the utmost difficulty when one is invisible he finds such problems as good in evil honesty and dishonesty of such shifting shifting shapes that he confuses one with the other depending on who happens to be looking through him at the time well now i've been trying to look through myself and there's a risk in it i was never more hated than when i tried to be honest or when even as just as now i've tried to articulate exactly what i felt to the truth no one was satisfied not even i on the other hand i've never been more loved and appreciated than when i tried to justify and affirm someone's mistaken beliefs or when i've tried to give my friends the incorrect absurd answers they wish to hear in my presence they could talk and agree with themselves the world was nailed down and they loved it they received a feeling of security but here was the rub too often in order to justify them i had to take myself by the throat and choke myself until my eyes bulged and my tongue hung out and wagged like the door of an empty house on a high wind oh yes it made them happy and it made me sick so i became ill of affirmation of saying yes against the nay saying of my stomach not to mention my brain there is by the way an area in which a man's feelings are more rational than his mind and it's it is precisely in that area that his will is pulled in several directions at the same time you may sneer at this but i know now i was pulled this way and for that for longer than i can remember pulled this way in that for longer than i can remember and my problem was that i always tried to go in everybody in everyone's way but my own i've also been called one thing than another while no one really wished to hear what i called myself so after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others i finally rebelled i am an invisible man thus i have come a long way and returned and boomeranged a long way from this point in society towards which i originally aspired so i took to the cellar i hibernated i got away from it all but that wasn't enough i still couldn't i couldn't be still even in hibernation because damn it there's the mind the mind it wouldn't let me rest jin jazz and dreams were not enough books were not enough my belated appreciation of the crude joke that had kept me running was not enough and my mind revolved again and again back to my grandfather and despite the farce that ended my attempt to say yes to brotherhood to the brotherhood no to brotherhood i'm still plagued by his deathbed advice perhaps he hid his meaning deeper than i thought perhaps his anger threw me off i can't decide could he have meant hell he must have met the principal that we were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men or at least not the men who did the violence did he mean to say yes because he knew that people was greater than men greater than the number and the vicious power and all the methods used to corrupt its name did he mean to affirm the principle which they themselves had dreamed into being out of the chaos and darkness of the futile past in which they had violated and compromised to the point of absurdity even in their own corrupt minds or did he mean that we had to take the responsibility for all of it for the men as well as the principal because we were the heirs who must use the principle because no others fitted our needs not for the power or the vindication but because we with given circumstances of our origin could only thus find transcendence was that we of all we most of all had to affirm the principle the plan and whose name we had been brutalized and sacrificed not because we would always be weak nor because we were afraid or opportunistic but because we were older than they in the sense of what it had to take what it took to live in the world with others and because they exhausted in us some not much but some of the human greed and smallness yes and the fear and superstition that had kept them running oh yes they're running too running over themselves or was it did he mean that we should affirm the principle because we through no fault of our own were linked to all the others in a loud clamoring semi-visible world the world seemed only as a fertile field for exploitation by jack and his kind with and with condescension by norton and his who are trying to be heard nope who are tired of being the mere pawns in a feudal game of making history had he seen that for these two we had to say yes to the principle lest they turn upon us to destroy it both it and us agree unto death and destruction grandfather had advised hell weren't they their own death and their own destruction except as the principal lived in them and in us and here's the cream of the joke weren't we part of them as well as part as apart from them and subject to die when they died i can't figure it out it escapes me but what i do what i really want i've asked myself certainly not the freedom of a reinhardt or the power of a jack nor simply the freedom not to run no but the next step i couldn't make so i've remained in the hole i'm not blaming anyone for the state of affairs mind you normally crying may occulpa the fact is you can carry part of your sickness within you at least i do as an invisible man i carried my sickness and though for a long time i tried to place it in the outside world the attempt to write it down shows me that at least half of it lays within me it came upon me slowly like that strange disease that affects those black men whom you see slowly turning slowly from black to albino their pigment disappearing is under the radiation of some cruel invisible ray you go along for years knowing something is wrong then suddenly you discover that you're as transparent as air at first you tell yourself that it's all a dirty joke or that it's due to a political situation but deep down you come to suspect that you you're yourself to blame and you stand naked and shivering before the millions of eyes who look through you unseeingly that is the real soul sickness the spear in the side that drag the drag by the neck through the mob angry town the grand inquisition the embrace of the maiden the rip in the belly with guts spilling out the trip to the chamber with the deadly gas that ends in the oven so hygienically clean only it's worse because you continue stupidly to live but live you must and you can enter you can either make passive love to your sickness or burn it out and go into the next conflicting phase yes but what is the next phase how often have i tried to find it over and over again i've gone up above to seek it out for like almost everyone else in the country i started out with my share of optimism i believed in hard work and progress and action but now after being after first being for society and then against it i signed myself no rank or any limit and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times but my world has become one of infinite possibilities what a phrase still it's a good phrase and a good view of life and a man shouldn't accept any other that much i've learned underground until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a straight jacket its definition is possibility step outside the narrow borders of what men call reality and you step into chaos ask reinhardt he's a master of it or imagination that's who i've learned in the cellar and not by deadening my sense of perception i'm invisible not blind no indeed the world is just as concrete ordinary vile and sublimely wonderful as before only now i better understand my relation to it and it to me i've come a long way from those days when full of illusion i lived a public life attempted to function under the assumption that the world was solid in all the relationships therein now i know men are different and that all life is divided and that only in division is their true health hence again i have stayed in my hole because up above there is an increasing passion to make men conform to a pattern just as my night just is in my nightmare jack and the boys are waiting with their knives looking for the slightest excuse to well to ball the jack and i do not refer to the old dance step although what they are doing is making the old eagle rock dangerously once all of the passion towards conformity anyway diversity is the word let the man let man keep as many parts and you'll see have no tyrant states why if they follow this conformity business they'll end up by forcing me an invisible man to become white which is not a color but the lack of one must i strive towards colorlessness but seriously and without snobbery think of what the world would lose if that should happen america is woven of many strands i would recognize them and let it so remain it's the winner take nothing that is the true great truth of our country or of any country life is to be lived not controlled and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat our fate is to become one and yet many this is not prophecy but description thus one of the greatest jokes in the world is a spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day and the blacks striving towards whiteness becoming quite dull and gray none of us seems to know who he is or where he's going what reminds me of something that occurred the other day in the subway i first saw only an old gentleman who for a moment was lost i knew he was lost for as i looked down the platform i saw him approach several people and turn away without speaking he's lost i thought and he'll keep coming until he sees me and then he'll ask his direction maybe there's an embarrassment in it if he admits he's lost to a strange white man perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are that must be it i thought to lose your direction is to lose your face so here he comes to ask his direction from the lost the invisible very well i've learned to live without direction let him ask but then he was only a few feet away and i recognized him it was mr norton the old gentleman was thinner and wrinkled now but as dapper as ever and seeing him made all made all the old life live in me for an instant and i smiled with tear stinging eyes then it was over dead and when he asked me how to get to center street i regarded him with mixed feelings don't you know me i said should i he said you see me i said watching intensely why of course sir so do you know the way to central street so last time it was the golden day and now it's center street you've retrenched sir but don't you really know who i am young man i'm in a hurry he said cupping a hand to his ear why should i know you i guess i should give him more of a raspy voice since he's getting older because i'm your destiny my destiny you said did you say he gave me a puzzled stare backing away young man are you well which train did you say i should take i didn't say i said shaking my head now aren't you ashamed ashamed ashamed he said indignantly i laughed suddenly taken by the idea because mr norton if you don't know where you are probably don't know who you are so you came to me out of shame you are ashamed now aren't you young man i've lived too long in this world to be ashamed of anything are you lightheaded from hunger how do you know my name but i'm your destiny i made you why shouldn't i know you i said walking closer and seeing him against a pillar him back against the pillar he looked at me like a cornered animal thought i was mad don't be afraid mr norton i said there's a guard down the platform there you're safe take any train they all go to the golden day but before but now an expression sorry but now an express had rolled up and the old man was disappearing quite spryley inside one of its doors i stood there laughing historic hysterically i laughed all the way back to my hole but after i'd laughed i was thrown back on my thoughts how had it happened and i asked myself if it were only a joke and i couldn't answer since then i've done i've sometimes been overcome with passion to return to that heart of darkness across the mason-dixon line but then i remind myself that the true darkness lies within my own mind and the idea loses itself in the gloom still the passion persists sometimes i feel the need to reaffirm all of it the whole unhappy territory and all the things loved and unloved in it for all of its part for all of it is part of me till now however this is as far as i've ever gotten for all life seen from the whole of invisibility is absurd so why do i write torturing myself to put it down because in spite of myself i've learned some things without the possibility of action all knowledge comes to one label one sorry all knowledge comes to one labeled file and forget and i can neither file nor forget nor will certain ideas forget me they keep filing away at my lethargy and my complacency why should i be the one to dream this night this nightmare why should i be dedicated and set aside yes if not to at least tell a few people about it there seems to be no escape here i've set out to throw my anger into the world's face but now that i've tried to put it all down the old fascination with playing a role returns and i'm drawn upwards again so that even before i finish i've failed maybe my anger is too heavy perhaps being a talker i've used too many words but i've failed the very act of trying to put it all down has confused me and negated some of the anger and some of the bitterness so it is so it is that now i denounce and defend or feel prepared to defend i condemn and affirm and say so say no and say yes and say yes say yes and say no i'd announce because though implicated and part partially responsible i've been hurt to the point of abysmal pain hurt to the point of invisibility and i defend because in spite of all i find that i love in order to get some of it down i have to love i sell you no phony forgiveness i'm a desperate man a bit too much of your life will be lost it's meaning lost unless you approach it as much through love as through hate so i approach it through division so i denounce and i defend and i hate and i love perhaps that makes me a little bit as human as my grandfather once i thought my grandfather incapable of thoughts about humanity but i was wrong why should an old slave use such a phrase as this is this or this has made me more human as i did in my arena speech hell he'll never he never had any doubts about his humanity that was left to his free offspring he accepted his humanity just as he accepted the principle it was his and the principle lives on in all its human and absurd diversity so now having tried to put it down i have disarmed myself in the process you won't believe in my invisibility and you'll fail to see how many pr how any principle that applies to you could apply to me you'll fail to see it even though death waits for both of us if you don't nevertheless the very disarmament has brought me to a decision the hibernation is over i must shake off the old skin and come up for breath there's a stench in the air which from this distance underground might be the smell of either of death or of spring i hope of spring but don't let me trick you there is a death in the smell of spring and in the smell of thee as in the smell of me and if nothing more invisibility has taught my nose to classify the stenches of death and going underground i whipped it all except the mind the mind and the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived that goes for societies as well as for individuals thus having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties i must come out i must emerge and there's still a conflict within me with louis armstrong one half of me says open the window and let the foul air out while the other says it was a good green corn before the harvest of course louie was kidding he wouldn't have thrown old bad air out because it would have broken up the music and the dance and when it was a good music that came out of the bell of old bad air's horn that counted old bad air is still around with his music and his dancing and his diversity and i'll be up and around with mine and as i said before a decision has been made i'm shaking off the old skin and i'll leave it here in the hole i'm coming out no less invisible without it but coming out nevertheless and i suppose it's damn well time even hibernations can be overdone come to think of it perhaps that's my greatest social crime i've overstayed my hibernation since there's a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play ah i can hear you say so it was all a build up to listen to him rave but only partially true because invisible and without substance the disembodied voice as it were what else could i do what else could try and tell you what was really happening when your eyes were looking through and it is this which frightens me who know who know but that on the lower frequent frequencies i speak for you i don't know what that sentence means how is that the how is that the last sentence it makes no sense who know but that on the lower frequencies i speak for you okay so i got it it took a second who know but that on a lower frequency so only people on the lower frequencies know that i'm speaking for them is basically what he's saying so basically he's speaking for the invisible people ugh wow all right um and that is the end of wow i didn't know that anyways that is the end of this book and um i'll be honest that last chapter was everything i hate about uh writers [Applause] um how do i put that um there's nothing wrong with throwing themes and ideas into a book right that's the whole point of books the whole point of a book is to compress your like complicated thoughts and your understandings of the world into a format that people can look at into kind of like a lens through which you create a world and the reader is looking at that world through that lens and they're saying oh i see this is how this character views the world this is how this character is impacted by the decisions of other characters and from that you can see a reflection of your own world in this world that the author has built the problem is authors writers tend to do this thing where they take the lens away and you know they take it off and they throw it away and they're like and now let me tell you exactly what i'm talking about and when they do that when they go into this like flowery speech trying to explain all of their ideas and explain it and like the complicated terms that their own brain have conceived when they do that i feel like it spoils the message it doesn't let the reader figure it out it doesn't let the reader come to their own conclusions it's basically like i'm in a monologue for 10 pages explaining why i think this way or the conflicts the character's going through and it's like i didn't need any of that what i needed was a better wrap to the story that like showed some growth and movement forward and i get that a little bit of that was seen through this chapter but i wish it was handled a little bit better anyways not the worst ending to a book but definitely a letdown in my opinion anyways let's let's go through it and see what he was talking about because i had trouble understanding pretty much all of it um basically says yeah i'm invisible um that's how i got to where i am this is my whole story uh these are some of the mental struggles i was going through it is from the still from the perspective of the character but like here's the struggles i was going through is basically my own identity that i couldn't figure out i was trying to play the roles that were assigned to me by other people and because they were assigning me roles they weren't looking at who i am they've been giving me different names i've been named by other people through my whole life and i never got to introduce myself as my own name and so because of that no one saw me for who i was and no one really saw me for anything that no one saw him basically saying they're only projecting they're only creating these aspirations in these fictional versions of him that they want him to work for but no one's looking at him as he actually is in that moment and because of that he's invisible and it's frustrating and then he says this is just too frustrating for me to deal with i'm i've abandoned the world because it is too difficult to play these roles that have been assigned to me it's too difficult to live up to these expectations so i've separated myself from this world and isolated myself so that i never have to actually deal with this like version of being half seen this version of just like creating and fulfilling this caricature that people want you to fill and so he's like all right i'm done with it and i've separated myself from the world and then at the end of this he says you know what maybe i should turn back around and go back into it because he runs into mr norton and he's like hey i'm your destiny mr norton again i've never understood this destiny theme that they keep throwing with mr norton never understood it um and that's probably just because i'm stupid there's probably a really good explanation um and that's why we have spark notes because it's here to save all of our lives and explain everything for us when we're too dumb to figure it out ourselves that's why i link it in the description so you can go back through and find out what they're talking about anyways he sees mr norton he's like i'm your destiny mr norton doesn't even remember him doesn't recognize him and runs away from him so our character's like ha ha ha he finds it really funny that mr norton's afraid of him and doesn't recognize that our character is his destiny whatever that means um uh possibly it indicates he's destined to fail because our character is a failure of mr norton's expectations he's like i expect great things from the black community because of all the effort i put into it and the energy and the money and yep and our character is basically like you failed i ended up just getting disillusioned with the world and isolating myself um but of course mr norton doesn't get that if that's the point that our character was trying to make because he doesn't remember our character um and that kind of indicates that our character was invisible to him the whole time he was putting his lens on our character as you are representative of the entire african-american race and i'm using you as my like goal post to set for the world and then our character doesn't fulfill that expectation so he's no longer in that perspective so mr norton's like well no because i i know who that was that was somebody that was going to succeed i don't know who you are you're crazy and so he's just invisible to mr norton and mr norton is afraid of him because he can't really see what kind of person our character is he just he's like are you are you eating are you are you crazy to our character because he's like implying he's like thin but also implying maybe he's just like so thin he's transparent i don't know that's kind of a stretch um but anyways uh he doesn't recognize our character because he just doesn't see him uh and so he leaves our characters like all right maybe this is he shows some regret i think in the last bits he's like maybe maybe there's a i don't even know what he's trying to say here at the end maybe you guys should be coming up with it he talks about death very a lot uh he explains that um when you come out in the spring there's smells of like beauty and stuff and things coming alive but there's also that stench of death that he's now very accustomed to smelling and he can pick it out um and he even acknowledges this the author he acknowledges the like obnoxiousness of him spending an entire chapter summarizing the way he does he says i hear you say so it was all a build up to boris with his buggy jiving he only wanted us to listen to him rave which is exactly how i feel it is i mean he said it and i felt it immediately i was like yes i don't know what you're raving about it's really difficult to understand you and you're talking in these abstract terms because he's rarely direct and clear about what he's talking about and that might be just because um in this time period there were consequences for explicitly stating things as they were if you were direct and you said something like white people are oppressing black people and it's awful in this country if you like explicitly stated that then your book would never get published and you'd be blacklisted and maybe even lynched or something like that so when this author is writing this book he has to be careful in writing abstract terms and i understand that it's just really frustrating for me because i don't live in that time period and i don't understand the abstract because my brain only works in the literal so it's kind of difficult for me to kind of like piece things together especially when i've been reading through this this whole book and i haven't really like complained about it because i know you guys don't want to hear me complain but this book is littered with pencils and penning and sub things written into it and i've been like reading around it and some of them like go through the words and also anytime they have the letter h in italics i don't know if you can see that this is going to be a stretch right here where it says he that looks like a b it looks like b and it's been so frustrating trying to read anything in italic because h's are b's but sometimes b's are just b's anyways yeah um you can tell because they like don't quite connect with h's but they do connect with b's anyways [Music] that's the whole book a greater message of the book what is the point of this the point of this was to say hey you're not noticing the struggles that are going on behind the scenes and i mean that's exactly why the blm movement came out this book is very timely maybe this book is a little bit late even for you to be reading right now because at pre-blm we're talking like 2018 2019 a lot of the struggles of the black community were being overlooked by a majority of the white communities and so it wasn't until black people started like going to the streets and saying hey stop killing us it's ridiculous we don't want to deal with this anymore it's not until that moment that some white people were just like it clicked with them and they're like wait a minute people are killing black people in the streets why is why is everyone saying it's not that bad oh look at black and black crime oh look at this look at that it's like aren't you just ignoring the fact that they're being shot down in the street isn't that the more important takeaway here how are you ignoring that it's like clearly we have an issue with police corruption clearly we have an issue with equality of opportunity because all of these black communities are staying poor so no matter what we've invested into it up to this point it hasn't been working we need to come up with more creative solutions we need to like actually resolve the issues that are just holding these people down and so these things are starting to come to light now again because back in the civil rights movement era all these things were white people just suppressing them and outwardly just being like yeah we just don't want black people to have rights and the civil rights movement happens then people like give them like a semi-equality and then following that black people are like okay yeah so i guess we have some rights now and it's fine and we'll move on with society and they think maybe at first it's not perfect because all the racists are still here but as time goes on things will get better so there wasn't a lot of claim complaining from the black community following this because they got the like legal equality that they were asking for it wasn't until we started seeing those repealed with those voting rights laws i like those in like a couple videos ago description i think um where they were appealing laws that allowed like voter discrimination not to happen so now black votes are more difficult to represent in states like georgia and texas especially with gerrymandering and things like that where they're redrawing districts around black communities so that white people are not white people but like republicans will get more votes but i guess that ends up being white people like 90 of the time um anyways because you see these kinds of like laws coming into place black people are like not fair anymore you started rolling back again we need to fix this and so that's i mean that's really all he's complaining about here is just that it takes forever for people to notice that there are really any like any issues with the society at hand when you're the one on top and you're the one benefiting and by on top i don't mean succeeding and doing well i just mean that the society is built around you you can still be exploited and you can still suffer and you can still be poor all these things can still exist while you're white it's just that you don't um you don't worry about getting shot when you get pulled over by the cops and uh when you get a bank loan you don't have to worry about a lot of the things that a black person would have to worry about and when getting a job you don't have to worry about your name looking weird to the person hiring you and so they choose not to hire you all of these things um just aren't a consideration for you don't see them you don't interact with them so you just don't know so their struggles are invisible to you as are the people it's not necessarily that you're directly racist you just can't see it because society doesn't allow you to it's not like they're put on a pedestal so you can be like hey look so when they force that kind of perspective and they're like guys look it's ridiculous half of them are just like half of the like white communities are just like why are you shoving that in my face i don't want to see that i feel like they're just pushing it on me i don't want to like have that push at me and they do the same thing with like uh gay communities we see a lot of like gay and trans characters and movies and things you'll see a lot of the white communities just being like stop shoving in our face we don't want to see it and it's like well actually the only way for you to acknowledge this is a problem the only way for you to acknowledge that these people exist is if it's shoved in your face because you've pretended it doesn't exist for like 300 years we just so it makes sense uh why they're complaining they're not right to complain i just i understand why they're complaining um and when you see black people in the streets for blm and of course you know white people and all the other races supporting them in solidarity um white people are going to be like hey why are you in the streets why are you like fighting for your rights right now why are you complaining everything's fine it's like it's because it just looks fine to you it's not actually fine things aren't good um so yeah it's it's it's great for that you think they're good um but if you look at the like the struggles they're going through uh the communities um it's probably better for you to just listen um it's not like thousands of people are in the street just because they want to whine they've got a good point if you just listen anyways um yes civil rights movement and blm tied together with this book actually because this is pre-civil rights movement this is right in that era when they're like starting to acknowledge all of the issues black creators writers artists musicians are all starting to say hey these are real issues that are coming kind of coming to a head and that was followed by a bunch of protests and yes riots did occur because of it [Music] and a lot of good came in the form of policy changes the racists were still around those racists eventually the young racist eventually went into government started trying to repeal those policies and here we are getting a little bit regressive but the fact that there are people in the streets fighting for their rights fighting to get that power back that the people should always have that's a good thing and this book does put a light on that showing these people aren't invisible just because you can't see their struggles doesn't mean that they don't exist just because they're invisible to you doesn't mean that their struggles need to be invisible to you you can do your best to like seek out an understanding of what they're going through and again that doesn't diminish what you're going through if you're white you can also struggle you can also be killed by the cops if you're white it's police brutality is an issue across the board it's just that um and you know poverty is an issue across the board especially depending on where you live it's difficult to pull yourself out of that poverty it's just that when you look at a larger percentage of the black community in poverty and it's a direct correlation to the fact that after they like got out of slavery no one would offer them jobs and because of that there was like entrenched poverty while houses were being pushed down to kids and more kids and like i'm sure your parents bought you a car and that came from the fact that they got to sell their house for a higher value and then got that extra money on top so they could provide their kids with a car and with education all those things were not allowed to the black community they didn't have that generational wealth built up for them and so they suffer from inequality in these situations and it's um again they're invisible to a lot of people um and this book was about highlighting their invisibility and saying hey these quiet voices these voices of the minorities need to be heard and um well hopefully we see some positive change in the future anyways i appreciate you joining me for the invisible man by ralph ellison next book will be holes good book shia labeouf is in the movie highly recommend the movie because apparently it was done incredibly closely to the book so you'll be able to draw direct parallels maybe i don't know maybe you can watch the movie right after i recommend watching a movie before you read a book only because a book can ruin a movie a movie can almost never ruin a book because books have more detail so um yes holst is a good book we'll see it anyways thank you i appreciate it uh uh sorry if my beliefs seeped through a little bit a lot of what i was saying i would like to think is just truth and not belief it's just the reality of the situation um and if you're watching this video years from now in the future past 2021 into 2030 or something like that uh hi hopefully things have gotten better um but looking at how things are trending i'm sure they've mostly stayed the same uh anyways enjoy your flying cars and i will see you in the next book or i won't bye guys [Music]

Channel: Micah Reads

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Length: 37min 0sec (2220 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021