Sam K's Swaggy Statements

     As a reader, I found Chapter 24 particularly disturbing, not only because of its content but by the message that the reader takes away from it. I feel that in this chapter, Ellison only perpetuates two horribly incorrect beliefs. The first, being that black men are violent beings with innate carnal desires to not only objectify and abuse but rape women, specifically white women. The second, being that women not only enjoy but quite literally ask for rape.      Similar to his interaction with the woman from The Woman Question, the narrator is desired by Sybil in an animalistic sense. She says to him on page 520, "Look at me like that; just like you want to tear me apart." Throughout he rest of the chapter, Sybil continues to objectify the narrator, calling him "boo'ful" and a "big black bruiser" (522-523). Sybil has a fetishized fantasy of her relations with the narrator because of his race. The narrator feeds into her desire telling her, "You...

  Throughout Invisible Man , the narrator crosses paths with many women. However, the overt dilemma is the depiction of all of these women. Ellison and the narrator both typecast both black and white women in the book into strict molds that they are to follow. While one may argue that Ellison's depiction of these women is merely because they are nonessential to the overall progression of the plot, this belief is not held to the men in the book that are present for only a few pages. Men who pass the narrator in a fleeting moment are given more depth, are displayed to have greater intelligence, and have a greater range of personalities and abilities than their female counterparts.  The white women in Invisible Man exist as only sexual objects of interest to the author and other characters in the novel. An example of this is in the first chapter of the novel, when the narrator is at the battle royal. As the students are ushered into the room where the fight will occur, they n...