Lil

One thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot is the narrator's development from the submissive, naïve kid he was at the beginning of the book to where he is now. We talked in class about whether or not he has truly discovered invisibility, or if he’s still being “kept running” by someone or something and I honestly don’t think there’s one right answer. On the one hand, I think he genuinely seems to have developed more of a consciousness and one scene where this is evident is the one where he talks to Hambro about the Brotherhood’s real intentions. When he’s told that they are basically abandoning Harlem, the narrator gets genuinely upset in a way that suggests a deeper consciousness, at least compared to the beginning of the book. He questions Hambro – he asks why. Why does it have to be Harlem that they’re “sacrificing?” One line that stood out to me was, after Hambro says “It’s inevitable that some must make greater sacrifices than others…” and the narrator replies, “That ‘som...

We’ve mentioned the ‘yam scene’ a few times in class, but we haven’t quite gotten to it yet so it’s pretty much uncharted territory for the moment. I think it’s a super important scene for a lot of reasons, but the most important one is the sense of freedom that the yams bring the narrator. He leaves Mary’s house needing a breath of fresh air and a break from his inner turmoil, and the yams end up bringing him a huge deal of clarification. He says immediately after eating the yams that he is “overcome by an intense feeling of freedom” and I don’t think that he’s truly experienced this feeling yet in the book (pg 264). I was definitely a little confused at first – that eating yams from the street can inspire an inner revelation in someone seems pretty weird – but then I thought about all the times that I’ve gone somewhere on my own, or bought something on my own and I understood a little better. Being in a situation where you answer entirely to yourself and everything you do is on ...