You Can't Handle the Truth

In Invisible Man, we see an interesting commentary on the nature of freedom in the vet. He, after becoming a doctor of great skill in France, came to the States and was soon after beaten for the idea that he could have dignity. Eventually, he was put into the asylum to be forgotten about, his words discounted as only those of a lunatic. But, despite his complete lack of physical freedom -- he can't even get himself transferred between hospitals until Dr. Bledsoe influences the hospital to move him as far away as they can -- he has a form of mental freedom. The thought that he is to be overlooked allows him to think and say many things he otherwise would not. By being labelled insane, he becomes very invisible, allowing him to think freely about whatever he desires.

Interestingly enough, Native Son has a parallel character, although he is touched upon much more briefly. When Bigger is in the jailhouse after the inquest, another prisoner is put into his cell. All the new guy does is scream and rant about his papers, and talking to the President, but the prisoners in the cells around Bigger explain the situation to him. They say that the man had been studying at a nearby university to write a book about how black people live, and went nuts. According to them, he said somebody stole all his facts, so he went to the post office in his underwear to get an appointment with the President to tell him directly why black people were being treated so badly. At this point, the man starts yelling specific details: "I'll tell 'im you make us live in such crowded conditions on the South Side that one out of every ten of us is insane! ... I'll tell 'im you tax us, but you won't build hospitals! ... I'll tell 'im you hire us last and fire us first! ..." As he goes on, the other prisoners start to holler and shout so that the guards will move him away. But, what they label as crazy are valid ideas that just are not typically voiced. For example, as Bigger is hiding from the police, he overhears a conversation wherein one person has been fired from his job due to the hype around Bigger's crime, and the other tells him that his white boss was just looking for an excuse to fire him. Additionally, Bigger himself comes to similar conclusions about the artificial divide between the South Side where he lives and Hyde Park where Mr. Dalton lives. Yet, the one person to speak up and voice his concerns gets thrown in jail and treated as if he is speaking in tongues.

Of course, with both of these characters the authors are trying to get a point across. In a nutshell, they are saying that nobody can handle the existence of the problems at hand, let alone how bad they all are. While the "crazed" prisoner in Native Son certainly did more to deserve his incarceration, he didn't deserve to lose the right to be listened to. Likewise, the vet was thrown into the asylum for the dangerous notion that he deserved dignity like any other man. In fact, when he yells at Mr. Norton for the invisibility he gives to and receives from the narrator, Norton simply brushes him off, saying, "Hurry, the man is as insane as the rest." Even the main characters of both books ignore them at first. Bigger promptly forgets about the "crazed" prisoner after he is carted away, and the narrator goes along with Mr. Norton and decides the vet's words do not need to be acknowledged. However, as the narrator realizes his invisibility, he does eventually open up to the vet's ideas. That is, as reality starts to click for him, he begins to understand what the vet was saying. Perhaps Wright and Ellison were hoping their books would click reality into place for the reader, so they could understand the depth of the mental restriction placed onto those like the narrator in the opening chapters of Invisible Man.