Symbols
Optic White Paint
Ellison uses the fictional Liberty Paint's brand of “Optic White” paint and it’s slogan “If It’s Optic White, It’s the Right White” to drive in the “whitest is rightest” mentality plaguing the world of Invisible Man. However, Ellison does not do so without using a bit of irony. This very paint is produced by the hands of a black man--the same man who ironically came up with the slogan. In addition, the color black is actually added to this paint to give it its pure white form. White cannot exist without black—thus, trying to separate white from black or make it stand on its own is a futile endeavor. |
Sambo Doll
Sambo first appears in chapter one in which one of the white onlookers at the Battle Royale calls the narrator by this name. Sambo was a well-known character from an early 1900s children’s book featuring a dark-skinned boy. The name “Sambo” later became a racial slur, which is how it is used in Invisible Man. Sambo reappears in chapter twenty as a doll. Former member Lincoln has left the Brotherhood, disillusioned by its double-face, and gone to creating racially offensive dancing puppets. This symbolizes how he has been treated like a puppet by the Brotherhood—it has pulled his strings to make him go this way and that, but it has not really cared about him as a person (which proves to be correct in the Brotherhood’s heartless response to the great tragedy that befalls Lincoln). Similarly, we can see that when the white man was referring to the narrator as “Sambo” in chapter one, he too was viewing the narrator as a mere puppet for entertainment. |