Boxing, Eyesight, and Ralph Ellison's the Invisible Man

In a work as long and ambitious as Invisible Man, there is ample opportunity for a wide variety of sub-themes to develop. Two of the most prevalent motifs found throughout this novel are sight and fighting. Ellison floods the pages of Invisible Man with countless references to eyesight, from the first two paragraphs of the prologue to the narrator's penultimate question at the end of the epilogue (3, 581). Likewise, if the events described in the novel were arranged chronologically, the episode where the narrator fights with the other youths from his school would be near the beginning and his encounter with the man on the street described in the prologue would reside near the end. When the narrator looks at the old photograph of the boxer before he gives his first speech with the brotherhood, these two themes seem to collide into a more visible, coherent message (334). To fully comprehend the deeper meaning of this section, however, one needs to discern that the fighter in the photograph was a real person whose life story is quite apt when interpreting Invisible Man. This passage bridges together the motifs of sight and fighting, while simultaneously alluding to boxer Sam Langford, in order to suggest that the protagonist, and possibly his race as well, has something to learn from the boxer's story.

There are an assortment reasons why the unnamed fighter in the picture has to be Sam Langford, most of which are revealed in a short biography. Like the narrator, Langford left home at an early age to go to the American northeast, running away from an abusive father and settling in Boston. He became involved with the boxing community and soon became a very strong, powerful, and feared boxer. Yet, he never was offered a chance to win a formal title in America more or less because of his race. He was forced to fight the same people, usually other black fighters, over and over again. Tragically, an injury caused by a fight in 1917 made his eyesight deteriorate rapidly. He kept on fighting anyway until 1924, and eventually he became totally blind. When a journalist tracked him down in the 1940s, he was living, very poorly, in Harlem of all places. Afterwards a charity fund was set up to help him live comfortably (Roberts; Cox; Hickock). The resurrected interest in Langford would have been contemporaneous with Ellison writing the novel.

As one can see, there are several similarities between this story and the passage in Invisible Man. When the narrator speaks about how his father thought the fighter had been cheated in a sort of conspiracy, it is analogous to how Langford never was given a fair shot at the title. But one aspect of the passage that does not appear to fit with this biography is that the photo depicts "a man so dark and battered that he might have been of any nationality" (Ellison 334). Usually the notion of nationality distinction, in the United States anyway, is used when discussing Caucasians; this would especially be expected in the northeast during the first half of the century. The race of the boxer is ambiguous in the text, but surely an African-American who is "dark and battered" still looks like an African-American to a casual viewer, whereas a German who looks rugged and beaten might not look much different than an old Irish or Polish fighter. The catch is that Sam Langford was Canadian, originally from Nova Scotia (Cox).

It is almost like the protagonist reintroduces the question from the prologue as he recalls standing there, "What did he do to be so black and blue?," with it this time taking on the added meaning of seeing only black. After all, Langford was not even American, but he was still "battered" and left feeling blue by the social system of this country. He "might have been of any nationality" because his nationality was irrelevant; it was his race that truly mattered (334). Ellison uses this allusion, which to modern readers is sadly much more obscure than it was with his original audience, to bring together the themes of fighting and blindness, and joining those two with race, suggesting that the plight of African-Americans is not exclusively an American struggle.

Another literary tool Ellison utilizes is that he furthers the boxing motif in this passage by analogizing the narrator himself to a boxer directly before and after. The first sentence of the given paragraph has the main character "seeing him take two of the other men by the arm and retreat to a corner," and towards the end of the paragraph, the narrator speaks of "jabbing…suspicions" away (334). In both of these cases, Ralph Ellison is using specific word choices to evoke boxing imagery, establishing that not only is the photograph of a famous prize-fighter, but outside the frame of that story, the narrator too is a form of boxer. In addition to this episode, the boxing metaphors and allusions arise intermittently throughout the novel, one of the most intriguing occurring late in the work. During the riot scene, the woman on top of the milk truck sings, "If it hadn't been for the referee,/Joe Louis woulda killed/Jim Jefferie" (544). What is ironic is that Joe Louis, the famous boxer, never formally fought anyone by the name "Jim Jefferie" or anything similar to it (Chajet). It seems like almost every page of the book has some tangential reference to boxing, much the same way that there are an abundance of references to vision.

The primary way that sight features in this passage, aside from the boxer's blindness, is that he is looking at a photograph, a media free of sounds and textures and smells. Unlike his talks with the various minor characters or his experiences in public, the picture can only be taken in through his eyes. The whole notion of invisibility in this novel is based on what the narrator states up front in the prologue, that it is about those who view him being unable to look at him without the lens of their "inner eyes," or their preconceived ideologies and stereotypes (Ellison 3). Once the protagonist has finally figured this out, he can recall this picture and view it in his memory free of any prejudiced influences. Sight, then, could serve as a metaphor for removing this filter from his "inner eyes," and similarly blindness is allegorical to being fully influenced by these ideological lenses.

It is when these ideas of fighting and vision combine that a deeper message can be attained from this passage. Both the narrator and the nameless boxer in the picture, assumedly a photograph of Sam Langford, are fighters. Both came to the northeast with optimism of escaping a part of their past. But unlike the narrator, the boxer kept fighting, completely losing his sight because he did not stop, or, as the passage says, he was cheated. Either way, it did not matter where he was from or who exactly who he was because no one could see his true character outside of their own personal ideological box. To the viewer, "he looked like a good man," but that did not matter to those who could not see it (334). The narrator too is meant to be looked upon as a fighter, not only for the literal fights he involves himself in or the boxing allusions that Ellison strategically places throughout the novel, but also because he is constantly fighting for the plight of his people, and in fact just after looking at this painting, the narrator gives his invigorating speech about dispossession to the brotherhood with many racial undertones (341-7).

In a way, the narrator and the old prize fighter cross paths in that arena. The story of the boxer, "in fighting stance," seems to convey the message that by staying the course in fighting things, the African-American winds up black, blue, and blind. The anonymous central character eventually gives up fighting, and is "rewarded" with vision and invisibility from those who hold prejudices. It is as though throughout the narrative, the protagonist is always, until he escapes underground, that young man who the Founder is "unveiling" in the statue at his university, always teetering on the brink between full blindness and full sight, very much similar to how many boxers wear hooded robes before a fight that seem to cover up the top halves of their eyes. Ellison seems to be putting all of these different ideas at work together in this passage to send a message to contemporary African-Americans that they need to remove the lenses from their eyes and become invisible; they need to quit fighting blindly.

The passage with the photograph of the old boxer serves as a warning of what happens when one refuses to reject the common notions of ideology and continues to fight. The protagonist and the object of the picture are both boxers. One keeps fighting by the rules, and consequently turns into a blind charity-case. The other eventually changes and consequently becomes invisible. Boxing is a voluntary form of fighting, after all, and giving it up simply means that one will not be black and blue anymore. In this section, Ralph Ellison evokes the allusion to the life of Sam Langford in order to connect the themes of sight and boxing in Invisible Man, and to relate them to the greater concerns of the text. That is, when people continue to blindly follow the rules of a society, metaphorically represented by boxing, they are made even more "black and blue," and the truth becomes further from their sight as the fabric of governing ideology slowly covers their eyes.