Symbolism Week 3

As the invisible man wakes up from the numerous poundings on the stream line that are just adding onto his penetrating headache, he desperately searches the room for an object to strike back with. He notices in a corner a doll like figure that turns out to be a coin bank, and represents a “very black, red-lipped, wide-mouthed Negro”(319). The invisible man is absolutely distraught at the fact that Mary would keep around what he calls a “self-mocking image” (319). The invisible man breaks the coin bank into many pieces and it is learned he can not get rid of them. He first tries to empty them into a trashcan until he is told “just take it right out!” (328). Then he leaves them on the ground only to be chased down by a man who tells him to “take this damn stuff”(330). It is apparent that since the invisible man can not escape the pieces, he has the inability to escape racism, which is what the coin bank represents. It also comes into turns that the coin back foreshadows the troubling relationship the narrator will face with the brotherhood. Even though the coin bank represents the opposite of what the narrator believes in, he himself is allowing himself to be seen as an abstraction of blackness by joining the brotherhood, therefore submitting himself to racism. The invisible man can still not find his own identity and is always following others orders himself. Once the invisible man gives up on throwing away the pieces, he simply puts them in his briefcase that he was given to earlier on in the novel by the white men for portraying an appropriate role. This just mirrors exactly what he is doing with the brotherhood, following the higher authority and foreshadows what he is about to do for them, following the role they want him to.