The Narrator Vs. Mystique--I mean, Rinehart
"'Rinehart, baby, is that you?' she said.
Rinehart, I thought. It works."
--Invisible Man, page 483
This was a pretty interesting chapter--after all this expectation that the book is about an invisible man, the narrator actually does become invisible! Well, in a way. I found it really cool how Ellison throughout the novel doesn't ignore the rules of reality completely but twists and stretches them pretty significantly for symbolic purposes. Just like the questionable concept of adding dark paint to more dark paint to produce white, it seems like a pretty crazy coincidence that the narrator is able to look so much like this other person just by putting on sunglasses and a hat. Maybe he's not invisible so much as a shape-shifter, like Mystique in X-Men. Anyway, while this coincidence doesn't make a whole lot of literal sense, it sure works on a symbolic level. Rinehart represents the shifting nature of identity. He is able to be everything from a gambler to a priest, and the narrator's identity completely disappears behind the outward appearance. It really helps depict a society where outward appearances, be they skin color or clothes or the way you walk, are all that people perceive, even though there may be much more to the story. Hmm, I wonder if they had all this symbolic significance in mind when they created the Mystique character for X-Men. Maybe. By the way, I totally think this book would make a great origin story for a comic book series. Ras the Destroyer is an excellent idea for an arch-nemesis.