RALPH ELLISON: Invisible Man Examine the narrator's experiences at the eviction.

Answer Details

The eviction scene in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is a turning point. Wandering through Harlem, the narrator comes upon an elderly black couple being thrown out of their apartment into the winter street, and his response to the scene launches his public career.

What he witnesses

• The narrator sees the old couple's household possessions piled on the pavement by the marshals: their few pitiful belongings, including free-papers, a torn Bible and other relics of a life reaching back to slavery.
• The sight of these objects stirs him deeply; they evoke the long history of black suffering and dispossession, and he is moved by the old woman's grief and the crowd's mounting anger.

His response

• Almost against his own intention, the narrator begins to speak to the gathering crowd. His improvised speech both restrains the people from senseless violence and voices their outrage.
• He discovers a sudden power of oratory, an ability to sway a crowd and to give shape to collective feeling.
• The crowd, roused, carries the furniture back upstairs, briefly defying the eviction, before the police intervene.

Consequences

• Brother Jack of the Brotherhood witnesses the speech and, impressed by the narrator's gift, recruits him into the organisation.
• The episode therefore begins the narrator's involvement with the Brotherhood, which will later use and betray him.

Significance

• The scene awakens the narrator to his own talents and to a sense of solidarity with dispossessed black people.
• It links his personal story to the wider history of the race, since the evicted couple carry the very documents of freedom and bondage.
• Ironically, the moment of his fullest human sympathy also draws him into an ideology that will render him more "invisible" than ever.

Conclusion

At the eviction the narrator finds his voice, his cause and the beginning of his fatal alliance with the Brotherhood. The experience is a milestone in his growth, fusing personal ambition, racial memory and the manipulations that will drive the rest of the novel.