Sacrificing the Weak

In chapter 23 of Invisible Man, the narrator finally realizes how terrible the Brotherhood is and he recognizes his invisibility. He talks about how the Brotherhood sacrifices the weak. He mentions how everybody has wanted to sacrifice him for “his good” but they were the ones that actually benefited. He also realizes that Jack is just like Norton and Emerson because they all tried to force their picture of reality onto him without giving any consideration to how he saw things. The narrator now realizes how he’s always being used or “kept running”, and now he’s noticed that no one has cared about how he really felt. He has realized that no one truly sees him, that he is in fact invisible. 

During the narrator’s meeting with the committee and Hambro, we get more insight into how the Brotherhood views things. Their views end up sounding pretty disturbing. Hambro starts talking about sacrifice. They’re just going to have to sacrifice the narrator’s members because “the interests of one group of brothers must be sacrificed to that of the whole”. The narrator equates this to sacrificing the weak for the strong. Hambro also talks about how they have to take advantage of the people, but in their own best interest. 

The issue with all of this is that the Brotherhood acts like they care about the people when they really don’t. If they really cared about the people of Harlem, they wouldn’t “sacrifice” them. The narrator is right in that the Brotherhood seems to sacrifice the weak for the strong because they’re so willing to drop the people in Harlem when they’re the ones they should be helping. The Brotherhood also, in part, hated Tod’s funeral because the narrator made him out to be a martyr even though he’s a traitor. Though, the fact that an unarmed black man was shot and killed by the police is more important than Tod being a traitor for selling those dolls. A lot of people showed up for his funeral, most probably because of the issue of police brutality, but the Brotherhood refuses to address this because Tod was a traitor. Also, the Brotherhood doesn’t take advantage of the people in their interest because they don’t even know what their interests are. Earlier its mentioned that the Brotherhood started to lose some following because they switched their focus to international issues rather than local ones, but the people’s “best interest” would be the local issues. It is now clearer that the Brotherhood doesn’t truly see the people, they’re invisible to them. The narrator is also invisible to the Brotherhood. Ever since they hired him, they’ve tried to change him so that he acts how they want him to. They literally give him a new name. They force their ideas onto him without asking him what he thinks, because they hired him to speak not think. They refuse to see the narrator as himself, they only want to see him in the role he was hired to play. 

The narrator has finally seen how the Brotherhood actually kinda sucks. They refuse to see both him and his people. He decides to use that to his advantage and finally decides to listen to his grandfather’s advice, he’ll “yes” them to death.