"A slightly different sense of time": palimpsestic time in Invisible Man

The Invisible Man learns to perceive this conflation himself in the Liberty Paints factory, a major turning point in his developing awareness of the temporal palimpsest. While stirring buckets of paint he begins to wax nostalgic, recalling first the painted buildings on his campus, then other whitewashed buildings he has encountered:

      Like Trueblood's cabin, or the Golden Day ... Damn that Golden
      Day! But it was strange how life connected up; because I had
      carried Mr. Norton to the old rundown building with rotting paint,
      I was here. If, I thought, one could slow down his heart-beats and
      memory to the tempo of the black drops falling so slowly into the
      bucket yet reacting so swiftly, it would seem like a sequence in a
      feverish dream ... (201)

His words both prefigure and recall his dreamlike journey--later in his life, earlier in the novel--into the multilayered tempos of "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue." Similarly, in this brief moment of temporal self-awareness at Liberty Paints, he starts to connect the separate moments of his life, to see how events in the past inform and resurface in his present, to perceive time as a palimpsest. This begins a practice that will persist throughout the rest of the novel as the Invisible Man repeatedly detects signs of the past in the present--his own personal palimpsests--whenever he is close to some major realization, particularly a realization about time.

Yet Ellison marks this turning point by nearly killing the Invisible Man in the explosion of Lucius Brockway's boilers. Brockway is another proponent of mechanistic fate, but unlike Norton, the old laborer knows that his mastery of the machines simply mechanizes him into one of their components; he proudly tells the Invisible Man, "we the machines inside the machine" (217). The Invisible Man's battle with Brockway is a struggle between past and present, old and new, mechanized fate and some other, as yet unarticulated, model of time and history. After the climactic explosion, an old man--possibly Brockway himself--says, "I tole 'em these here young Nineteen-Hundred boys ain't no good for the job" (230). The epithet "Nineteen-Hundred boys" brands the Invisible Man as a symbol of the twentieth century, highlighting the generational aspects of his clash with Brockway.

But the Invisible Man does not simply battle a prior generation in the Liberty Paints boiler room; he struggles against his enemies' model of mechanistic time itself. When he attempts to shut down the over-pressurized tanks, he reports, "All my movements seemed too slow, ran together" (229). Conversely, at the moment of the explosion he "seemed to run swiftly up an incline and shot forward with sudden acceleration" (230), experiencing a sudden alternation in the passage of time. Finally, as if Ellison wishes to remind readers that the Invisible Man has battled with time and failed, the protagonist finds himself "beneath a pile of broken machinery, my head pressed back against a huge wheel" (230). Wheels and circles signify time throughout Invisible Man, from the Golden Day historian's rant about roulette wheels to the Brotherhood's circular dialectics. Thus, while the Invisible Man has become aware of history's palimpsest, has battled with fate's chief mechanic, and has symbolically destroyed the machinery of time itself, he also finds himself trapped under time's central symbol. This metaphoric death in the boiler room is not a complete failure, however; it is merely the death of his old sense of time, creating the possibility for the birth of a new one.