INVISIBLE MAN Summer Reading STUDY GUIDE Name:______1
ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS AS YOU READ THROUGH THE NOVEL THIS SUMMER. USE FULL SENTENCES THAT BEGIN WITH A CLEAR SUBJECT, not A DIRECT REPETITION OF THE QUESTION’S LANGUAGE. THE MORE THOROUGHLY YOU EXPLORE THESE QUESTIONS, THE BETTER YOU WILL PERFORM ON THE INVISIBLE MAN MULTIPLE CHOICE TEST!*
PLEASE UPLOAD ONLY YOUR RESPONSES TO turnitin.com
ALL WORK MUST BE DIGITAL; YOU WILL SUBMIT YOUR
ANSWERS IN FULL SENTENCES TO turnitin.com
*You will also be asked to present/show your annotated text as evidence of close reading. If you do not own the copy of the book you read, you must make notes on paper or Post-it notes and present those notes to your teacher. YOU WILL BE GRADED ON HOW THOROUGHLY YOU ANNOTATE THE TEXTS.
PROLOGUE
1. How would you describe the tone of the first two paragraphs?
2. What is ironic about the narrator’s encounter with the blond man?
3. Who are the “sleeping ones”?
4. Explain the narrator’s desire for light in his hiding place in the basement.
Chapter One
5. Explain the advice the narrator’s grandfather gives him: “Let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.”
6. How does this chapter show the limits of assimilation?
Chapter Two
7. How is the road in the first paragraph used as a metaphor?
8. What makes the sleeping farmer “the kind of man [that the narrator fears]”?
9. Why is Mr. Norton’s enthusiasm for his daughter so strange to the narrator?
10. Explain how the following statement is an example of foreshadowing:
“I’ve never seen this section before. It’s new territory for me.”
11. What is the tone that Trueblood uses to tell the story of his incest?
12. Why does Trueblood receive so much more charity from the white community than from his own?
13. Why does Mr. Norton give Trueblood $100?
Chapter Three
14. What is the significance of the wide range of professions that the insane men at The Golden Day used to practice?
15. Why does the veteran call the narrator invisible?
Chapter Four
16. Why does the narrator hate Trueblood and the people at The Golden Day?
17. What is the effect of comparing the campus building to an “old plantation manor house?”
18. How has Dr. Bledsoe achieved power in society?
Chapter Five
19. What phrase does the narrator use to describe Dr. Bledsoe’s position relative to the trustees around him? Why is this significant?
20. How is simile used to express the effect of the Founder’s death?
21. What is the rhetorical effect of Rev. Barbee’s blindness?
22. What images does the narrator see as he leaves chapel?
Chapter Six
23. Why is Dr. Bledsoe so angry with the narrator?
24. Compare Dr. Bledsoe’s ideas about black/white relations to those of the narrator’s grandfather.
25. How is Dr. Bledsoe’s handshake an example of foreshadowing?
Chapter Seven
26. What does it mean when the veteran tells the narrator to be his own father?
27. What allusion is used to describe the narrator’s arrival in Harlem?
Chapter Eight
28. What is ironic about the narrator’s discovery of the book in his room at Men’s House?
29. The narrator notices distinct differences in the way black men and women speak in the North as opposed to in the South. What is ironic about this?
30. What is unusual about the narrator’s description of the pictures in Mr. Bates’s office?
Chapter Nine
31. What is the purpose of the drawn-out conversation between the narrator and Mr. Emerson’s son?
32. Describe the tone of Dr. Bledsoe’s letter.
33. What extended metaphor does the narrator use to describe the imagined conversation between the elder Mr. Emerson and Dr. Bledsoe?
Chapter Ten
34. Explain the extended metaphor of Liberty Paints.
35. How are Lucius Brockway and Dr. Bledsoe similar? Include a quote from the text which identifies this similarity.
Chapter Eleven
36. After the explosion, the narrator wakes up while being examined by a man with “a bright third eye that glowed from the center of his forehead.” How does that image connect with the motif, or recurring/recognizable theme, of blindness in the novel?
37. Describe what the men “treating” the narrator are doing to their “patient.”
38. “I was beyond anger. I was only bewildered.” Describe the other effects the “treatment” had on the narrator.
39. How is the narrator changed after leaving the “factory hospital?”
Chapter Twelve
40. What purpose does Miss Mary serve for the narrator?
41. Describe the alienation the narrator feels toward the end of this chapter.
Chapter Thirteen
42. What is the metaphorical value of the yams?
43. What is the narrator’s rhetorical argument as he addresses the crowd at the eviction of the old couple?
Chapter Fourteen
44. What is the narrator’s principal motivation for accepting the job?
45. What is the idea behind the narrator’s confrontation with the drunken man who wants him to sing, because “all colored people sing”?
46. What is the difference between the definition of “we” that people like Mary embrace and the definition that people like Brother Jack embrace?
Chapter Fifteen
47. Why does the narrator get so angry when he notices the cast-iron coin bank in the shape of a caricature of a black man, with a big red smile and large white eyes, in his room at Mary’s house?
Chapter Sixteen
48. How does the description of the stage contribute to the narrator’s sense of isolation?
49. Why do some members of the Brotherhood object to the narrator’s speech, while Brother Jack finds it more than “effective”?
Chapter Seventeen
50. How might Tod Clifton serve as a more effective spokesman than the narrator, at least in the eyes of Emma, the woman the narrator meets at the first Brotherhood social gathering?
51. Ras the Exhorter expresses his disgust and confusion when grappling with Tod Clifton and the narrator. What are the reasons for Ras's anger toward the two black men of the Brotherhood?
Chapter Eighteen
52. How is Brother Tarp's slave chain-link different from Dr. Bledsoe's?
53. What does the narrator mean when he says that Brother Westrum “snatched [him] back to the South”?
Chapter Nineteen
54. What happens when the narrator is called back to headquarters for an emergency meeting, and what news does Brother Jack deliver to the narrator?
Chapter Twenty
55. How did Clifton choose to make his escape, or “to fall outside,” from history?
56. At the end of the chapter, what does the narrator realize about the significance of his ‘leadership’?
Chapter Twenty-One
57. In the description of the funeral procession, how do the images show the angry pride of the crowd?
58. What does the narrator mean when he says that everyone at the funeral is in the box with Tod Clifton?
Chapter Twenty-Two
59. What is the reason behind the narrator’s conflict with the Brotherhood?
60. What is the metaphorical value of Brother Jack’s glass eye?
Chapter Twenty-Three
61. Explain the significance: “If they tolerate Rinehart, then they will forget it and even with them you are invisible.”
62. How has the narrator become invisible?
Chapter Twenty-Four
63. How has the narrator come to adopt one of Dr. Bledsoe’s strategies?
Chapter Twenty-Five
64. How does the burning tenement show progress?
EPILOGUE
65. What does the narrator mean when he says he became “ill of affirmation”?
66. What definition of invisibility spurs the narrator to return to social action?
motifs and symbols to keep track of:
blindness invisibility/identity Liberty Paints plant Sambo doll – (look it up too)
the coin bank dreams envelopes/letters The Brotherhood’s ideologies
adapted from Prestwick House, Inc.: AP Individual Learning Packet Teaching Unit, 2006