Invisible Man: Irony 4 key examples

The narrator's description of the Golden Day, a bar where various illicit activities take place, is saturated with situational irony. Mr. Norton, one of the rich white trustees of the historically Black college attended by the narrator, believes strongly that education will help to “improve” the lives of African Americans, and consequently he donates extensively to the university. The narrator similarly believes in the transformative power of college education and is optimistic about the bright future that he has been promised. At the Golden Day, however, Norton and the narrator encounter a number of highly-educated African Americans who undermine this faith in education: 

Many of the men had been doctors, lawyers, teachers, Civil Service workers; there were several cooks, a preacher, a politician, and an artist. One very nutty one had been a psychiatrist. Whenever I saw them I felt uncomfortable. They were supposed to be members of the professions toward which at various times I vaguely aspired myself, and even though they never seemed to see me I could never believe that they were really patients. Sometimes it appeared as though they played some vast and complicated game with me and the rest of the school folk [...]

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The narrator uses a number of similes when describing a chaotic scene at the Golden Day, a seedy bar located near the college campus. A group of patients at a nearby mental hospital who frequent the bar have decided to strike back against the hospital orderly, named Supercargo, who has been assigned to keep them in line, brutally attacking him on the staircase after he attempts to restore order: 

Supercargo grabbed wildly at the balustrade as they snatched his feet from beneath him and started down. His head bounced against the steps making a sound like a series of gunshots as they ran dragging him by his ankles, like volunteer firemen running with a hose. The crowd surged forward. Halley yelled near my ear. I saw the man being dragged toward the center of the room.

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At the sermon presented in the campus chapel, the narrator listens to a speech by Reverend Homer A. Barbee, from Chicago. In this darkly ironic scene, Barbee lavishes praise on the college’s founder, alluding to the Biblical figure of Moses: 

And then his great struggle beginning. Picture it, my young friends: The clouds of darkness all over the land, black folk and white folk full of fear and hate, wanting to go forward, but each fearful of the other. A whole region is caught in a terrible tension. Everyone is perplexed with the question of what must be done to dissolve this fear and hatred that crouched over the land like a demon waiting to spring, and you know how he came and showed them the way.

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In a deeply ironic passage that is dense with allusions and metaphors, the narrator describes a sermon at the college chapel, which is attended by the school’s wealthy white donors: 

Here upon this stage the black rite of Horatio Alger was performed to God’s own acting script, with millionaires come down to portray themselves; not merely acting out the myth of their goodness, and wealth and success and power and benevolence and authority in cardboard masks, but themselves, these virtues concretely! Not the wafer and the wine, but the flesh and the blood, vibrant and alive, and vibrant even when stooped, ancient and withered. (And who, in face of this, would not believe? Could even doubt?)

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