A Fun, Little Marionette Reality
"Somewhere a machine began to hum and I distrusted the man and woman above me"...
"Be quiet now," one of them said firmly. "You'll be all right" (232).
And just like that, he was silenced. In chapter eleven, the narrator wakes up in a hospital where he sees several unfamiliar figures. The whole chapter reminded me of a Marionette: a puppet controlled by strings. Immobilized and unable to make decisions for himself, the narrator could be considered "lifeless" like a puppet. Although his facial and physical features seem to show a human, he was definitely not treated as such, but rather, as a puppet.
However, instead of a regular puppet that is directly controlled by a single person's hand and has no strings, a Marionette is more complicated:
In this case, the people behind the strings controlling the narrator in this chapter are the doctors, but more generally, the white people who dominate society. And even the cross at the top where strings come down from could tie into religion. While these wealthy, powerful, white men appear innocent and trustworthy, with their actions always justified in the name of the cross (religion), they are really just manipulating their way to the top of society with their invisible strings. They use minorities, specifically African Americans in this case, to become their new "puppets" to stare at in amusement.
In the beginning, there was the electrified carpet and fake money, and now there is unnecessary physical nerve testing on the narrator; in both cases, the narrator seems to "perform" for the white people as they stare from above, much like a puppeteer and a Marionette.
Another interesting thing to note:
Throughout the novel, we see the character slowing growing into the person they were initially introduced as. After chapter eleven's procedures, we see a change in the narrator. He's not as afraid of white people anymore. Additionally, white people and racism were both the causes of the narrator's development. Would we credit the narrator's transformation from where he started to who he eventually becomes, as shown in the introduction, completely to white people?
I think this is a really great comparison, and I completely agree with you about the white people in the narrator's life. The narrator is getting used by so many people he comes across, being treated as a symbol, an experiment, or a source of entertainment. The white people he meets see him as nothing more than a pawn, and dehumanize him. The way you tied religion in as well was really clever, and I hadn't thought about that aspect as much until I read your blog post.
ReplyDeleteThis is a really interesting metaphor. It seems like over the course of the book the narrator is becoming more and more conscious of this control. While he was at the college he seemed fine and unbothered by it, then in the city he realizes the people controlling him had lied and misled him, in the factory he starts judging and notices flaws in the direction of his white boss, and in the doctor scene you talked about he seems actively uncomfortable with the white people peering over him and completely controlling his fate. I mean over time it's also becoming more obvious - illustrated in just how clear the doctors are in control of the narrator. It'll be interesting to see how this develops in the rest of the book.
ReplyDeleteI really liked reading your blog post! I haven't ever thought about a metaphor like that before and I think that it's a really interesting one. For a while after the incident with the doctor, it seemed like the narrator wasn't himself and that he was in sort of a dream-like state. Nice post!
ReplyDeleteI think your metaphor is super interesting! But I want to focus instead on the question that you pose at the end of the post "Would we credit the narrator's transformation from where he started to who he eventually becomes, as shown in the introduction, completely to white people?" I think that something to note when answering this question is that white people have been the force pushing him forward to new experiences (e.g. to college, to the paint factory, everything at the hospital, into the Brotherhood, etc., though Bledsoe pushing him to the city is a possible exception to this), but the forces that push him to question his own identity and push him to think more deeply tend to be black characters. For example, Bledsoe, Brother Tarp, and Rinehart are all very important in the narrator learning about his invisibility. So I think that if anything, we can say that the narrator's change has been the result of black characters influencing his way of thinking.
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