I guess I should have seen it coming since Mr. Mitchell warned us multiple times about the dialogue that happens between the books, but reading Native Son and Invisible Man back to back has really been a wild experience. One comparison which blew my mind just a little just because of how painfully specific it was, was the similarity that we talked about today during class between the narrator in Invisible Man and Bigger Thomas. In Chapter 3 specifically, the former is so clearly a reflection of Bigger Thomas that it’s difficult to ignore. He is tasked with driving around a white client who makes him at once uncomfortable and confused. And yet, against his better judgment, he is compelled to stray from his intended course. In doing so he exposes his passenger to a new lifestyle and part of town - something that was certainly not in his job description. But as soon as the ball gets rolling it can’t be stopped, and in parallel with Bigger’s fate, readers get the feeling that our narrator has no real control over the events that follow. Hard as he tries, he just can't win. Further, Mr. Norton himself is a reflection of the well-intentioned-but-forever-falling short-of-true-‘wokeness’ brand of white person that Native Son is full of. It’s as if Emerson extracted the worst qualities of each Dalton family member and combined them to create one Mr. Norton. He's got Mrs. Dalton’s inability to see our narrator for who he truly is (besides a "black amporphous thing" -pg 95), Mr. Dalton’s self-congratulatory claims to charity and ‘bettering’ the African American race, and finally Mary’s uncomfortable infatuation, or rather fetishization of our narrator’s blackness.

But, aside from these parallel scenes, the main characters in Native Son and Invisible Man seem to me  (as far as we’ve read at least) almost like polar opposites. Yeah, they both act as mediocre chauffeurs at one point in their narrative, but they really couldn’t be more different. Where Bigger is violent and unpredictable, the narrator in Invisible Man is pretty consistently content to be submissive. Where Bigger resents and fears white people (for good reason!), the narrator in Invisible Man aims to please them. Where Bigger has been ostracized by the system, the narrator in Invisible Man, by attending university, is literally a part of it. If the two were to meet, I would imagine it would go something like this: Bigger would resent or distrust the narrator in Invisible Man for succeeding in a system which is stacked against them – after all he is that much closer than Bigger to becoming a pilot or achieving his own dreams. As for the narrator in Invisible Man, I think he would view Bigger as a reflection of everything he is scared to become, or at least that which his education saved him from becoming (not to mention the fact that Bigger has less "cast down his bucket," and more tossed his bucket into a furnace to burn).

Interestingly though, Emerson presents his narrator’s education as almost trivial in the context of his larger journey towards the enlightenment we see in the prologue. At this point, having read all of Native Son and only a few chapters of Invisible Man, it’s actually Bigger – with 8 years of education to our other character's 15 – who possesses the greater consciousness. He is acutely aware of his place in society, and the injustice of it all. In contrast, the narrator in Invisible Man is naïve and optimistic, and he trusts the system even if it means swallowing his own blood to deliver a speech about social responsibility. It’s here that the characters differ the most, but again, Invisible Son has only just begun and if Chapter 3 paralleled Bigger’s time with Mary and Jan, maybe it’s only a matter of time before our narrator accidentally murders a white girl and achieves enlightenment. J