Bledsoe as a Well-Meaning Character

Bledsoe in a Sympathetic Light

Bledsoe is a striking character in the narrator's past. He only appears for three or so chapters in the book, and yet almost twenty chapters later he still affects the narrator. He’s an interesting antagonist who seems to be living large by knowing how to play the game right. At the same time, after I had seen him sans “mask” he quickly began to lose appeal. In fact after the exposure of the contents of the letters he gave to the narrator, which had a huge build up, he just disappeared. The sense of mystery was gone. But then, I thought back to Swimming with Sharks, and realized that Bledsoe could be the sympathetic antagonist, or rather a tough love father figure, who teaches the protagonist harsh lessons through harsher means, but with the protagonist’s best interests at heart. This would have been an even more intriguing element to his character and would make even his supposedly unmasked persona into a mask, covering a man with a hard outer shell but a sympathetic heart.

            In Swimming with Sharks, Guy, a young Hollywood writer, becomes assistant to Buddy Ackerman, a big movie producer and one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. The job working for Buddy is known for having a “good lineage”: the previous 4-5 assistants have all gone on to power and fortune in their next jobs. Guy starts his first day and Buddy seems like a great guy until Buddy asks for a packet of Sweet ‘n’ Low, and Guy brings him a packet of Equal. This does not go over well with Buddy, and he chews him out until the point where Guy is afraid he’s lost his job. This scene is very reminiscent of the scene with the Narrator and Bledsoe after he takes Mr. Norton to Trueblood’s house and the Golden Day.

From this point on Buddy is shown as being nothing but abusive, yelling, insulting, and throwing things at Guy every time he makes a simple mistake. Buddy even seems to be pleased with himself after he does this too, smiling to himself as soon as Guy leaves. This too seems familiar to Bledsoe, with him taking pride in his “mask”. Over the course of the movie, Buddy is shown further manipulating Guy, not only verbally abusing him, but pretending to be on his side before stealing his work and taking credit from the CEO. This is also like Bledsoe’s act in front of the other board members. Guy does progressively learn though, and it seems that he too is learning the ropes starting to get a hand on things, like the narrator with his small moments of rebellion in the early part of the novel.

We then cut to a scene (more than a year in the future) where Guy has evidently had it with Buddy. He breaks into his house and tortures him for all of the bad things he has done to him. At this point we begin to see a different side of Buddy. We learn Buddy’s wife was killed and raped by gangsters after she tried to help a car that appeared to have broken down on Christmas Eve. Buddy then says to Guy “I know what it’s like, I can appreciate this. I hated authority, hated all my bosses…. Look it’s like they say, if you’re not a rebel by twenty you’ve got no heart, but if you haven’t turned establishment by thirty you’ve got no brains. There are no storybook romances, no fairy tale endings. So before you run out and change the world, ask yourself what do you really want?”

The movie then cuts back to Guy a year into his job. He’s started to get cocky, he has a nicer car, he now wears a suit and sunglasses, and is shown talking on the phone to people in the same condescending and sarcastic manner as Buddy does when he doesn’t get what he asked for. Guy then notices Buddy pretending to heap praise on him to the other executives on the phone, but Guy notices the light go off signaling the line going dead. We cut back ahead to Buddy’s house as he’s being held captive and Guy confronts him about this asking “Did you really think I was that stupid?” Buddy then attacks him saying “I told you what you needed to hear! You were getting lazy, complacent, complete job burnout, and don’t think I didn’t notice. You didn’t give a shit anymore, dragging your feet everywhere, telling people you were doing my job!” This part of the movie has faint echoes of New York and the Brotherhood, where the narrator starts to get cocky, he starts dressing the way Bledsoe does, and starts “becoming” Bledsoe.

Another parallel is Buddy’s line “I didn’t make the rules, I play by them.” This seems oddly reminiscent of Bledsoe’s discussion with the narrator bragging about his mask where he says the same thing.

At the end Guy learns Buddy was being so tough on him, because if Guy could handle everything he threw at him, he could handle any job. At the end of the movie Guy becomes an executive, and all the little comments Buddy made, seeming to compliment only his own ego shifted meaning, now seeming to be thoughtful advice sprinkled among the hate he had to endure to get this position.

So what do you think? Can Bledsoe, who keeps haunting the narrator’s dreams even now, be seen as someone who only was hard on him so he could learn how to play the game as a black man in America? Am I reading too much into this comparison? I’ll be glad to hear anything you have to say.

Touring a Tour

            In Melvin Dixon’s Tour Guide: La Maison des Esclaves, Dixon narrates a tour he took of La Maison des Esclaves, the House of Slaves, in Senegal. The House of Slaves was the last holding point for slaves before they exited overseas. The tour in the poem works on two levels. In it the author not only recounts his experiences of the tour to us, but gives us a thorough tour of the building, its history, the tour guide, the tour itself, and people’s reactions to the tour. He takes us on a tour through the present and past of the building, and in this sense, he encompasses more history than the tour guide at the memorial himself. The past of the building is frequently referenced, with bold, harsh imagery such as “men traveling in spoon fashion, / women dying in afterbirth” and “we stand in the weighing room / where chained men paraded firm backs, / their women open, full breasts, / and children, / rows of shiny teeth.” (Dixon 2-3, 27-31). The tour guide is described similarly: “His guttural French is a hawking trader. / His quick Wolof a restless warrior. / His slow, impeccable syllables a gentleman trader.” (Dixon 18-22). He also paints pictures of reactions to the memorial: “We take / photographs to remember, others leave coins to forget. / No one speaks / except iron on stone / and the sea / where nothing’s safe.” (Dixon 47-53). Throughout this poem, the reader feels a mixed bag of emotions from uncomfortable to eerie, all of which further the author’s purpose of letting us experience what he did. With all of these factors combined the author paints a powerful portrait of a harrowing reminder of the past.

The Nameless Narrators

While it’s an unlikely comparison, the narrator in Invisible Man parallels the narrator in Fight Club quite closely. They both are nameless throughout their respective books; they use poetic language and metaphor, use a flashback to explain how they arrived at their current situation at the beginning of the book, and are of questionable sanity. This comparison can help understand the characters in both books, and give new insight to the psychology of the character.

Through both books the narrators of Invisible Man and Fight Club are nameless. This gives them a certain artistic license. It shrouds them in a layer of mystery, and to some level, it allows us to put ourselves in their place. They seem to be, on some level, metaphorical products of their environments, racism and consumerism, rebelling against the world. The fact that we don’t know who they are almost makes the voice feel like our own, and it also blurs the lines between thought and voice in both novels.

The language used by the narrators through the novels, especially in the chapter before the flashback, and gradually more so as it approaches that point, is a very poetic, odd, and striking voice. They use strange imagery that makes you question your perceptions. In Invisible Man the narrator describes a statue of the college founder lifting a veil from a slave’s head. He says “When I look again, the bronze face, whose empty eyes look upon a world I have never seen, runs with liquid chalk–creating another ambiguity to puzzle my groping mind: Why is a bird-soiled statue more commanding than one that is clean?” In Fight Club the narrator has lost everything in his apartment in an explosion and he comments “I wasn’t the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalog.” These narrators both use unusual images that truly make you read over them several times thinking "Did I read that right?", which is exactly what they are trying to do, make you look over to truly understand the deeper meaning which lies within almost humorous images.

Imagery of death plays a large role in the voice of the narrators. In Invisible Man, the narrator beats up a man then says “Something in this man’s this man’s thick head had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life. I began to laugh at this crazy discovery. Would I have awakened at the point of death? Would Death himself have freed him for wakeful living?” This results in a powerful image, making us question whether we are truly more free than those who are dead. In Fight Club the narrator also questions life in a 9-5 job. Wondering if a job, even one where he gets to travel regularly, really means freedom he states “I set my watch two hours earlier or three hours later, Pacific, Mountain, Central, or Eastern time; lose an hour, gain an hour. This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time.”

            Both books start in the present and use a flashback to explain how they arrived there. They both feature dark imagery. In Invisible Man the narrator is living in a basement apartment with over one thousand light bulbs, and beats up a man just for calling him a name, and we still wonder if he isn’t enlightened as he talks about being invisible. In Fight Club the narrator is at the top of a building with a man with a gun in the narrator’s mouth, and explosives at the base of the building. The narrator voices his thoughts and words poetically throughout this entire chapter, yet most of what is being said is meaningless to us as we don’t know how he got there. These chapters also bring into the back of our minds a question of sanity of the narrators for the rest of the book, as we aren’t necessarily sure that they’re insane, but at the same time owning a basement apartment with over one thousand light bulbs, and questioning the cleanliness of the gun in your mouth rather than the fact that there is one there don’t really seem to be behaviors of a sane person.

            With all of this in consideration, these narrators seem to come across as more effective than if we know everything about the narrator. If we know their name we are assured that they’re fictional, which, while expected, in some way still lingers at the back of our minds. If our narrator is a Harvard graduate, we criticize their upbringing, we assume they were a legacy admission, we dismiss their knowledge of life unrelated to academics. The fact that they have no name, no town associated with them, and they use elaborate and unique imagery makes them seem almost like a messiah; because we know little to nothing about them, there is little or nothing to hold against them or detract from their voice, even the argument of sanity. One of the questions both these books pose is one of what defines and blurs the lines of sanity and insanity. This makes us question ourselves rather than the narrators, and makes them seem all the more powerful.