Invisible Man: Satire 3 key examples

The novel offers a deeply satirical portrayal of the unnamed historically Black college which the narrator attended for three years before being unfairly expelled. Ellison, who attended the historically Black Tuskegee Institute before dropping out in his third year, was deeply critical of the university in his later life. In this novel, he lampoons the college’s leadership as well as its wealthy trustees. One figure, the millionaire Mr. Norton, is a satirical representation of the white donor class: 

They were all such a part of that other life that’s dead that I can’t remember them all [...]  But this one I remember: near the end of my junior year I drove for him during the week he was on the campus. A face pink like St. Nicholas’, topped with a shock of silk white hair. An easy, informal manner, even with me. A Bostonian, smoker of cigars, teller of polite Negro stories, shrewd banker, skilled scientist, director, philanthropist, forty years a bearer of the white man’s burden, and for sixty a symbol of the Great Traditions.

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After receiving a scholarship from a group of wealthy but sadistic white men in his hometown in the American South, the narrator attends an unnamed historically Black college. Through his portrayal of the college, Ellison presents a satirical portrait of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which he attended for three years before moving to New York for work. The cynical college president Dr. Bledsoe, for example, is a satirical representation of the administration of such a college. After the narrator returns to campus from his ill-fated outing with the wealthy trustee Mr. Norton, the narrator recounts his conversation with Bledsoe: 

“The quarters! Boy, are you a fool? Didn’t you know better than to take a trustee out there?” 

“He asked me to, sir.” 

We were going down the walk now, through the spring air, and he stopped to look at me with exasperation, as though I’d suddenly told him black was white. “Damn what he wants,” he said, climbing in the front seat beside me. “Haven’t you the sense God gave a dog? We take these white folks where we want them to go, we show them what we want them to see. Don’t you know that? I thought you had some sense.”

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In a scene that satirizes labor unions, Ellison employs dialect and slang associated with working-class, unionized laborers in the mid-20th century. When the narrator accidentally interrupts a clandestine union meeting while trying to eat lunch at the Liberty Paints factory, he is immediately condemned as a traitor by one of the union members, who argues against including the narrator in the union: 

“I’m against it! Brothers, this fellow could be a fink, even if he was hired right this minute! Not that I aim to be unfair to anybody, either. Maybe he ain’t a fink,” he cried passionately, “but brothers, I want to remind you that nobody knows it [...] Please, brothers!” he cried, waving his arms for quiet. “As some of you brothers have learned, to the sorrow of your wives and babies, a fink don’t have to know about trade unionism to be a fink! Finkism? Hell, I’ve made a study of finkism! Finkism is born into some guys.” 

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