Marriam Harrissa Mulonya
BAH/P/77/07
Miss Asante Mtenje
American Novel
26th June 2012
Analysis of major characters in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: Brother Jack
Brother Jack is our main contact with the Brotherhood and he is a mysterious character. He is a white man and he easily enters the narrator's life and offers him a ton of opportunities like money, a job, and the chance to represent his community. There are many strings attached to the benefits that the narrator accrues through working for the Brotherhood. Brother Jack demands that the narrator renounce his past, focus on the collective, and use abstract jargon and ideology in his speeches. Although he professes to be in favor of racial equality, when the Brotherhood shifts its aims, Brother Jack willingly sacrifices the Harlem community without thinking twice. His literal blindness is a metaphor for the flawed nature of his vision.
Ellison uses Brother Jack to point out the failure of abstract ideologies to address the real plight of African Americans and other victims of oppression. At first, Jack seems kind, compassionate, intelligent, and helpful, a real boon to the struggling narrator, to whom he gives money, a job, and seemingly a way to help his people fight against prejudice. But as the story progresses, it becomes clear that the narrator is just as invisible to Jack as he is to everyone else. Jack sees him not as a person but as a tool for the advancement of the Brotherhood’s goals. It eventually becomes clear to the narrator that Jack shares the same racial prejudices as the rest of white American society. After the Brotherhood’s focus changes, Jack abandons the black community without remorse.
The narrator’s discovery that Jack has a glass eye occurs as Jack enters into a fierce tirade on the aims of the Brotherhood. His literal blindness thus symbolizes how his unwavering commitment to the Brotherhood’s ideology has blinded him, metaphorically, to the plight of blacks. He tells the narrator, “We do not shape our policies to the mistaken and infantile notions of the man in the street. Our job is not to ask them what they think but to tell them!” Throughout the book, Jack explains the Brotherhood’s goals in terms of an abstract ideology. He tells the narrator in Chapter 14 that the group works “for a better world for all people” and that the organization is striving to remedy the effects of too many people being “dispossessed of their heritage.” He and the other brothers attempt to make the narrator’s own speeches more scientific, injecting them with abstractions and jargon in order to distance them from the hard realities that the narrator seeks to expose.
To many black intellectuals in the 1930s, including Ellison, the Communist Party in particular seemed to offer the kind of salvation that Jack appears to embody—only to betray and discard the African-American cause as the party’s focus shifted in the early 1940s. Ellison’s treatment of the Brotherhood is largely a critique of the poor treatment that he believed the black community had received from communism, and Jack, with his red hair, seems to symbolize this betrayal.
Brother Jack, who has a “buttermilk white eye” (Ellison 474), provokes the narrator to gain a partial sight of the truth. Brother Jack presents an image of the blind leading the blind down avenues of self-denial and lack of self- awareness. He is a white man who supposedly works to promote the cause of the black man as a principle figure of the Brotherhood, but “instead follows the old line of bearing the ‘white man’s burden’. Brother Jack lost one eye “in the line of duty” and now wears a glass one in its place, relating him to the unique idea of half-sight because “the false eye he wears symbolizes his basic deviation from the ideals of his brotherhood. His sight is artificial, then, rather than nonexistent”. Brother Jack is half blind and only sees what he desires to see because he has a fixed idea of life and racial standards. When Brother Jack’s white eye becomes ‘distorted by the light rays’. The instrument of white vision is focused only in the direction of things white, white psychologically, intellectuality, it can’t perceive individuated black objects and men”. His vision is hindered by his own racial beliefs, and he cannot perceive anything different from what he has known for such a long period of time. Not immediately realizing that Jack wears a glass eye, the narrator, after a while, begins to realize that Jack does not see him as any more of a person than the white men of the Battle Royal had, instead viewing him as a tool to advance the goals of the Brotherhood, which are not necessarily the goals of the black community.
However, that the narrator does realize it, both on a physical and on a metaphysical plane, marks a significant change over the scene regarding the Battle Royal. Where the narrator lacked any insight into the situation before, he now has a half-sight into the motives behind Jack’s actions. His growing half-sight gradually becomes evident as he “becomes aware of the subtleties of the racial conflict”. Repeating “he doesn’t even see me” (Ellison 475), the protagonist emphasizes his realization of Brother Jack’s blindness to anything that is not in his predetermined vision of everybody. It is Jack’s half-blindness that symbolizes how commitment to ideology can blind a person to the plight of the individuals caught up in it, even to the point of denying such a connection exists. The narrator does finally realize and accept Brother Jack’s “blindly unfocused” eyes when he asks, “Which eye is really the blind one?” (Ellison 478), emphasizing his half-sight.

Brother Jack Timeline and Summary

• Brother Jack hears the narrator speak at the Provos' eviction. He follows him across rooftops and invites him to coffee and cheesecake.

• Brother Jack introduces the vague idea of the Brotherhood to the narrator. He gives the narrator his contact info.

• Brother Jack doesn't sound surprised to receive the narrator's call. He and some other brothers pick the narrator up before taking him to the Chthonian. Brother Jack has Emma give the narrator his new name.

• Brother Jack tells the narrator that he could be the new Booker T. Washington. He tells the narrator to break contact from friends and family. He gives the narrator the address for his new apartment (equipped with readings on the Brotherhood). Brother Jack also has Emma give the narrator 300 bucks, and tells the narrator that his weekly salary will be 60 dollars, which is a lot back then.

• Brother Jack introduces the narrator to everyone at the get-together and denounces a man who asks the narrator to sing.

• Brother Jack picks up the narrator and takes him to a warehouse where he will deliver his test speech. Brother Jack warns the narrator about getting too far away from the Brotherhood discipline.

• Brother Jack meets the narrator at a bar four months later. He tells him that he is the new spokesman for the Harlem District.

• Brother Jack takes him to the district office, introduces him to Brother Tarp, and shows him to his office.

• Brother Jack warns everyone that the Brotherhood does not stand for violence at the meeting the next morning.

• Brother Jack sends the narrator an anonymous letter warning him against moving too fast, saying it'll make people uncomfortable and suspicious.

• Brother Jack leads an interrogation against the narrator. He tells him that he can either be an inactive member in Harlem or go downtown to work on the Women Question.

• Brother Jack ridicules the narrator for treating Clifton's death like a celebration for a hero. In the excitement, his false eyeball pops out. He proudly tells the narrator that he lost his eye as a sacrifice.

• Jack tells the narrator to visit Hambro for further directions.

• Brother Jack has a two-day birthday celebration.

• The narrator dreams that Brother Jack and other men hold him down and dig out his eyeballs, flinging them into the surrounding black water. Instead, the eyeballs get caught on the bridge and drip red into the water.

Works Cited

Ralph, E. Invisible Man. USA: Random House, 1952.