Symbolism: Week 5

Upon departing the bus at Harlem, the invisible man finds himself under a bridge. Suddenly, he hears a sound and his mind quickly portrays “an image of wings, as something struck my face and streaked” (533). He then realizes that bird droppings have now fallen upon him, and he notices the grotesque composts “splattering around, falling like rain” (534). This absurd scene relates back to the invisible man’s vivid description of the Founder statue at the college in chapter two, where he witnesses a bird soil the compelling statue. However, he finds it ironic that the statue seems even more beautiful than before, stating “Why is a bird-soiled statue more commanding than one that is clean” (36). This parallel between the invisible man and the Founder statue’s encounters with birds symbolizes black oppression. The once uncontaminated character and statue are left with a white stain on their blackness, showing that they suffer the same fate that their forefathers also endured. Realizing the irony of his circumstance, he runs “blindly, boiling with outrage and despair and harsh laughter” (534). The invisible man reacts in this outlandish way as a result of becoming aware of the fact that he, like the Founder, has been used as a propaganda tool to deceive others into blind loyalty to an ideology. The Founder is exploited by Dr. Bledsoe, while the Brotherhood carries out this same act on the invisible man, by treating the two as abstract symbols representing blacks instead of valuing them as individuals.