86 pages • 2 hours read
Ralph EllisonInvisible Man
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1952A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 2-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary
The protagonist recalls the campus of the college he attended, mentally traversing both the university and the surrounding areas. The manicured, idyllic campus is presented alongside a psychiatric hospital and rendezvous places for veterans to visit prostitutes.
During his junior year, the protagonist serves as a driver for one of the college’s White founders, Mr. Norton, while he visits the campus. He takes Mr. Norton on a tour of the countryside, and along the way the two men converse about Mr. Norton’s contributions to the college. Although he has a distinguished career as a researcher and philanthropist, the founder regards his efforts to the college as his main legacy and contribution to the good of humanity. He tells the protagonist about his daughter, who has passed away and in whose memory he works.
The protagonist drives through the impoverished countryside and tells Mr. Norton about the scenery and people they see. They pass by the house of a man named Mr. Trueblood who committed incest with his daughter, resulting in both her and her mother, the man’s wife, becoming pregnant at the same time. Mr. Norton demands to be let out of the car so he can talk to Mr. Trueblood, who explains to the men that he, his wife, and his eldest daughter shared a bed while the younger children shared another one, and one night he found himself reflecting on his daughter’s maturity and a boy her age who seemed to be romantically interested in her. Mr. Trueblood tried to fall asleep and had a dream in which his daughter’s genitals were symbolized by a tunnel in a clock. When he woke up, he found that he had committed incest with her in his sleep. His wife was furious and tried to shoot him but then relented and accepted him back into the family.
The incest comes to be known in the area and the community, particularly White people, rallies around the family. Mr. Norton listens with rapt attention to Mr. Trueblood’s story and gives him $100 when he and the protagonist leave, suggesting that he had an incestuous connection to his deceased daughter. When they get into the car, it’s clear that Mr. Norton is deeply affected by hearing the story, becoming weak and distressed. Mr. Norton asks the protagonist to get him some whiskey, and they go off in search of it.
Chapter 3 Summary
Desperate to revive Mr. Norton, the protagonist drives him to the closest place he can get whiskey, a local bar/brothel called the Golden Day. On their way there, they encounter a group of veterans from the psychiatric hospital making their way to the Golden Day to drink and visit the resident prostitutes, a well-known weekly ritual. The protagonist is nervous about taking Mr. Norton there because he knows it will be chaotic, and when they arrive he tries to buy a drink to take out to Mr. Norton in the car. The bartender refuses to let him do that, and he’s forced to bring Mr. Norton, who has become increasingly weak and faint, inside. The veterans, all Black, make a spectacle of Mr. Norton, and they resist their attendant’s efforts to control them, eventually beating the attendant until he passes out. The protagonist tries to get Mr. Norton out of the bar, but he’s too weak, and the two must go upstairs to a vacant prostitute’s room so he can recover. Another veteran, seemingly lucid, says he used to be a physician, and he eventually revives and calms Mr. Norton. The veteran soon becomes nonsensical, however, and the protagonist and Mr. Norton leave the bar and drive away.
Chapter 4 Summary
The protagonist drives Mr. Norton back to the campus, worried that he will be punished for allowing the founder to come so close to harm. Mr. Norton is shaken by his experience at the Golden Day and tells the protagonist to summon the school’s president, Dr. Bledsoe. Dr. Bledsoe reprimands the protagonist for taking Mr. Norton to the impoverished, unpolished areas they drove through and tells him to wait at his dorm until he’s summoned.
Still worried, the protagonist waits through dinnertime and then is called to Dr. Bledsoe’s office, where he finds Mr. Norton. Mr. Norton tells him that he’s explained to Dr. Bledsoe that the events of the day weren’t the protagonist‘s fault, and that he will be leaving campus earlier than expected. He instructs the protagonist to go to the college’s evening chapel service and tells him that Dr. Bledsoe will speak with him later. Still apprehensive but somewhat relieved at Mr. Norton’s pacified demeanor, the protagonist heads to the chapel.
Chapter 5 Summary
The protagonist attends the college’s evening chapel service in a state of anxiety about his future, noting with detachment and a sense of distance the movement of the people around him and up on the chapel’s stage. One of the speakers, Rev. Barbee, recalls the journey he and Dr. Bledsoe took with the college’s founder as the founder traveled around the country advocating for African American education. Upon the founder’s death, Dr. Bledsoe was appointed to lead the college, and Rev. Barbee praises the president’s work that enabled the development of the college. At the end of the speech, Rev. Barbee stumbles on the stage and it’s revealed that he’s blind.
Rev. Barbee’s speech makes the protagonist feel even guiltier about the mishaps with Mr. Norton and fearful that he will be expelled for failing to live up to the ideals of the college and its leaders. He leaves the service just before its end because of his emotions, and then proceeds to the administrative building where he will meet with Dr. Bledsoe.
Chapter 6 Summary
Dr. Bledsoe berates the protagonist for taking Mr. Norton out into the impoverished areas around the school and for letting him meet with Mr. Trueblood. Behind Dr. Bledsoe’s conciliatory and subservient manner toward White people, he is actually attempting to control them by manipulating their perception of Black people and the school. Dr. Bledsoe thinks the protagonist was naïve and foolish to obey Mr. Norton blindly without thinking about the impression it would give of the Black community and of the school. However, the protagonist isn’t expelled but rather sent to New York for the summer to find a job with a school trustee and try and learn some “common sense” when it comes to working with White people.
Still ashamed of himself and eager to repair the damage he’s been told that he’s done, the protagonist quickly prepares to leave and is given letters of recommendation to help him find a job. Dr. Bledsoe sternly warns the protagonist not to open the sealed letters. The protagonist heads toward a nearby bus station to depart immediately for New York.
Chapters 2-6 Analysis
Ellison uses this section of Invisible Man to deepen the racial narrative he began in the first group of chapters. For example, Norton describing the “barren” area that existed before he and the other founders started the college indicates that he thinks of funding Black education as a “civilizing” task. Norton also exhibits a skewed conception of the college and the area. When the protagonist drives him into an area of poor farming, Norton says, “I don’t remember this section” (40) and overlooks the “ragged driver” of a “broken-down wagon” because he is too intent on the trees, thinking commercially: “It’s good timber” (41). Norton tends to think of the Black community in the abstract, focusing on its effect on White men like himself and Black people’s role in helping them fulfill their “destiny” (41). The protagonist’s responses to such rhetoric in this section of the book are usually wholehearted belief in such ideas, indicating that he has yet to question White people’s conceptions of race and worthiness. Such naïve thinking demonstrates that he’s still at the beginning of his self-development journey.
Ellison also examines Black poverty and continued oppression in the southern US following the “Reconstruction” era of the US Civil War and prior to the social unrest of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. The protagonist sees the poverty, poorly-treated mental illnesses, and hopelessness exhibited by the sharecroppers, Truebloods, and veterans—but he understands them as embarrassments that should be hidden from Norton, not as circumstances to be critically examined. (Like his unquestioning acceptance of White rhetoric, this indicates that he has not yet embarked on his journey of self-examination and independent thought.) The idea that individual choices dictated one’s outcome in life—regardless of such societal factors like race, class, family structure, etc.—was used as a justification for discriminating against those who were denied privilege. Offering limited privilege to some members of the Black community through education while understanding that the majority would continue the cycle of poverty and hopelessness gave White people the ability to claim that those who did not “succeed” failed to do so because of their own choices.
Dr. Bledsoe is an important figure who is introduced in this section as well. The protagonist respects him as an authority figure and admires him as a Black role model. In fact, later it’s revealed that the protagonist has Bledsoe in mind as someone he would like to emulate or even work for after he’s done with college. Like the White men whom the protagonist will eventually come to question and distance himself from, the protagonist will tear Bledsoe down from the figurative pedestal on which he has placed the older man. However, the protagonist’s responses to Bledsoe in these chapters—unquestioningly trusting Bledsoe when he says not to open the “letters of introduction,” for example—show that he has not yet learned to question or dismantle the authority figures of his early life.
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