Whenever we go on a road trip that
we know is going to take hours or even days to get there, we always find a way
to avoid the long journey of sitting doing nothing. We tend to keep ourselves
busy, reading books, listening to music sleep or anything that will distract
you from experiencing the long hours in the car. It’s the journey we tend to
escape, waiting to reach the destination. What we have gone against the quote,
“ To Travel is Better than to arrive” Though Ralph Ellison expresses this in
his book through the invisible man, that the journey and the experience that
comes along may be the one’s that matters most than the destination.
In this novel Ralph shows how
the invisible man is so focused on the destination. He has planned his whole
path when in college; his destination was to graduate at the college than remain
at the school as a teacher, a member of the administrative staff or become Dr. Bledsoe’s
assistant in page 184. The man complements him of his ambitiousness, the destination
he had kept for himself ignoring all that may come along as long as the
destination is reached.
Similar to Brother Jack, he is also
destination focused, he doesn’t care about how you make your way through, all
he cares about are the results in the end. As long as they are what he wants,
the journey doesn’t matter. That can be very dangerous because you do not know where
the path may lead you. Too much destination focus may drive you or put you
through experiences that are unnecessary and that could have been is avoided
have not the person been so destination focused.
Due to this, within the journey
there become other journeys within. As illustrated by Ralph Ellison in his
book, unfortunately there is not only one long path that the invisible man
travels through, that would send him right to his destination. There are journeys
that he goes through but since he has a destination, to him it is all worth it.
The journey in college where he had all his life planned out, in what he was
going to do, who he was going to become and where he will work. Then all of his
dreams ended up destroyed by mistake of not lying to the founder and sending
him to the trouble, the university was hiding from them. He learns of his
verdict and partially accepting it believing he would come back and fulfill his
dreams and reach his destination.
The Harlem Journey where he finds
out in page 184, that his dreams are finally crushed in there is no way of returning
to the university seeing the letter Dr. Bledsoe wrote to the founder, his Harlem
journey begins. Where he has to find a job and be able to pay the rent and all
other necessities. The invincible man finds a job in an industry where things go
array and he ends up having a mechanical accident resulting him being out of
that work after he recovers only to find himself in another journey.
The journey he starts with the
Brotherhood is another drive that the invisible man is pulled in without
checking both sides the advantages and disadvantages, he enters in this group
more likely of the peer pressure around than studying what it is about in Pg
305, and Brother Jack compares him and how his work is going to be in one of
the best Booker T. Washington. Anybody would love the chance to become Booker
T. Washington, Brother Jack is using the reference of great names known in
history to him, knowing that that will make him want to join the group without
putting much thinking or questions. Brother Jack says he is the next history to
be made Pg 307. Not knowing what he has gotten himself into, he accepts and
become a member of the Brotherhood.
Due to the invisible man’s
journeys, he finds himself wandering in paths that do not belong to him. He no
longer has his own destination, but now he is helping to fulfill someone
else’s, Brother Jack’s. The invisible
man gets in this brotherhood and performs his mission not knowing that
everything has a limit. There is a limit to every to everything regardless the
occupations he gets into this quickly and wants to make sudden changes that
Brother Jack becomes worried about since it was not what he wanted. In the invisible
man’s chase, he finds himself picking up the identity of someone else Reinhert
and following his path not knowing where it will lead him either. By using the
identities of others, he makes himself a man without identity leaving behind
nothing for anyone to follow for he is
invisible.
In this novel The Invisible man by Ralph Ellison, one journey ends as another one begins for The Invisible man. The Harlem Risk game is designed to fit the similar pattern of power that Brother Jack, The Invisible and Reinhert want to accumulate. They all want power in different ways and this game is to be played trying to accumulate power from the territories within the continent. “It is not how many times you fall but how many times you get back up”. Is what the invisible man kept on doing in defense of his identity where he might have been successful.
No comments:
Post a Comment