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"A slightly different sense of time": palimpsestic time in Invisible Man
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2003 by Marc Singer
After this final escape, the Invisible Man dreams that Jack and the other temporal "scientists" (570) attempt to reclaim him. Castrated and yet victorious in his refusal to resubmit to their control, he tells the scientists that his dripping testicles are "your sun ... your moon ... your universe, and that drip-drop upon the water you hear is all the history you've made, all you're going to make" (570). Given the practice of castration at lynchings, this dream suggests that the scientists have created a history of racial violence and oppression. Yet the dream also implies that the scientists' putative mastery over history depends entirely on their suppression of racial minorities. By scoffing at their control, the Invisible Man rejects their temporal authority and demonstrates that he will no longer allow them to dictate his past or his future. After this realization, the Invisible Man acknowledges that he can no longer "return to Mary's, or to any part of my old life.... I could only move ahead or stay here, underground" (571). And so he lingers underground, outside of time, until he is ready to end his hibernation and reenter the world.
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Conclusion
In his underground lair, the Invisible Man finally codifies the hard-won understanding of time and history that he articulates in the novel's prologue. But he does not identify his own position within this palimpsestic temporality until the epilogue, where he defines himself against all the reductive and deterministic modes of time that he has fled.
The Invisible Man resoundingly rejects the Brotherhood's presumption of control over history, first saying he will leave the interpretation of history "to Jack and his ilk" (572) and then disparaging "the futile game of 'making history'" (575) practiced by Jack, Norton, and the other temporal scientists. Spurning their conceit that humans can control history by manipulating the destinies of others, he instead proposes to build a different kind of historical record that includes all experiences, all cultures. The Invisible Man has already applied this lesson on the cultural level, learning to view African-American vernacular culture as "the only true history of the times" (443), and he continues this practice with his citation of two Louis Armstrong songs in the prologue and epilogue (8, 581). But he also learns to apply this new inclusiveness to his own history, "to confront all aspects of his experience, even those previously shunned and repressed" (O'Meally, Craft 92). Because he now knows that his identity is a palimpsest of his experiences, he can no longer ignore the unpleasant parts of his past. Instead, he says, referring to his painful memories of the South, "Sometimes I feel the need to reaffirm all of it, the whole unhappy territory and all of the things loved and unlovable in it, for all of it is part of me" (579).
He nevertheless refuses to return to that past, as he did after his last rebirth, acknowledging that he cannot "return to Mary's, or to the campus, or to the Brotherhood, or home" (571). Yet he also understands that by finally accepting his invisibility he has "come a long way and returned and boomeranged a long way from the point in society toward which I originally aspired" (573); in other words, as he says in the final page of the novel proper, "The end was in the beginning" (571). These words, however, do not indicate a true repetition but rather the kind of dialectical or "boomeranging" progression that has characterized his growth throughout the novel. Ellison would later distinguish this progress from simple repetition in a 1973 interview, where he stated that "Vico, whom Joyce used in his great novels, described history as circling. I described it as a boomerang because a boomerang moves in a parabola.... It is never the same thing" ("Ralph Ellison" 73). The Invisible Man has only boomeranged away from his old goals, not back to his old identity, and he continues to reject strictly circular modes of time. He has learned to accept his past, but he no longer works toward its perpetuation, repetition, or return.
