Crafting Creative Concepts with Charlotte

The Brotherhood in  Invisible Man  is a very strange organization. The leaders are hypocritical, corrupt, and blindsided by their beliefs, which is made increasingly obvious to the narrator and the reader throughout the book. The Committee is made up of ideologues, who, if you remember from Mr. Butler's class, are historically extremely disconnected from the realities of society. Clifton's death really brings this key flaw into the narrator's mental spotlight, and this creates more distance and tensions between the narrator and the committee. The narrator really starts to realize the flaws in the Brotherhood's overarching generalizations after Clifton is shot. Because the narrator saw Clifton's death as very individual, he starts to see Harlem as a collection of individuals instead of a generalized mass. He really sees the men in the zoot suits for the first time, even though he has seen people like them many times before. He notes that the Brotherhood overlook...

One of the most significant transitions undergone by the narrator in Invisible Man  is his move from the South to New York. In New York, he tries to rid himself of his southern identity, and recreate himself as a sophisticated northerner. However, despite his greatest efforts, the narrator cannot manage to redefine himself because of one thing: nostalgia. Though he isn't fully aware of it, the narrator is extremely emotionally attached to the South, and this prevents him from developing into the man he wants to be. The narrator's nostalgia pops up a few times while he's in New York. He dearly wants to eat the southern-style breakfast at the diner, even though he declines. He reminisces on his times in college, and then we get the yam scene, the most symbolic of all. It's snowing when he's eating the yams, which is an exclusively northern form of precipitation. Yams are primarily a southern food, and the flavor and scent of the yams brings back forgotten memories o...