The Running Man

When Invisible Man’s narrator retells the experiences of his past, the difference between the narrator’s current self and his past self is vast. The two of them have contrasting views of their life and aspirations. While the current narrator has discovered and accepted his “invisibility” as a black man in a racist society, in his retelling of his life, his past self does not realize his invisibility, and he believes he can make a change in the world. However, as the story progresses, the narrator starts to understand how the progress he believes himself to be making is not progress at all, but is exactly what is required of him to keep the oppressive society he lives in unchanged and balanced.

In the first chapter of Invisible Man, after the narrator endures the nightmarish Battle Royale, he finally gets to read the speech he had come to the event for in the first place. In front of his town’s “leading white citizens,” he delivers his speech badly bruised and swallowing blood, still hoping to make an impact on his audience. However, the rich white people in the crowd pay no attention to the contents of his speech, instead, they laugh at and ridicule him. The only moment they pay attention is when the narrator says “social equality” instead of “social responsibility.” The audience becomes agitated and concerned, and they only calm down when the narrator assures them it was a mistake. Once he finishes his speech, despite their complete lack of interest, the white citizens applaud him, give him a prize scholarship to a college only for black people, and announce that he will “lead his people in the proper paths.” This scene exhibits how the white people of Invisible Man do not care about black people’s progress or achievements until they threaten the status-quo of the racist society they live in and contribute to. Though the narrator is clearly intelligent and academically accomplished, the white leaders send him to a college segregated from them, communicating that his progress will never get to interfere with theirs. However, when the narrator accidentally utters one suggestion of change to their society, “equality,” it sends the white men into an uproar. The narrator’s one slight deviation to the path they have set for him is much more important to his oppressors than anything else he had to say in his speech.

This idea is further supported in the narrator’s dream following the event, in which he opens his prize with his deceased Grandfather. Inside it is an envelope, which he opens to reveal another envelope, and “another and another, endlessly, and [he] thought [he] would fall of weariness.”(33).  When he finally reaches the last envelope, he reads its contents: 

“To Whom It May Concern,” [he] intoned. “Keep this N-word Boy Running.” (33). This dream sequence signifies the unimportance of the narrator’s progress in the eyes of American society, and the awards and acknowledgement he receives are only to “keep him running” on a path that leads to nowhere. 

The theme of the running man continues once he reaches New York, when junior Mr. Emerson convinces him to open the “recommendation” letter Mr. Bledsoe wrote for the narrator to give to the affluent and powerful senior Mr. Emerson. When he reads the letter, he discovers that Mr. Bledsoe does not recommend him, rather, he describes the narrator as a case who has gone “grievously astray,” and asks Mr. Emerson “to help him continue in the direction of that promise which, like the horizon, recedes ever brightly and distantly beyond the hopeful traveler.” (191).  This letter depicts the narrator as simply a confounding variable, or someone that has deviated from the path expected of him. Mr. Bledsoe, representing the effects of deeply ingrained oppression in America, wants the narrator to return to his path of illusionary achievement, and keep him running on his endless and meaningless wheel.

After he reads Bledsoe’s letter, the end of Chapter 2 signifies a change in the narrator, where he is now cognizant of his role as the “running man,” and wants to break out of it. I’m interested to see how the story will progress with the narrator’s change in understanding of his life, and what his new goals will be as an “ex running man.”