Invisible Man

Ellison's writing is excellent. The whole work has prolific meaning. Each word, each sentence is pregnant with layer upon layer of interpretation. The black and white text, the black and white struggle is full of color! Vivid, vivid color and words. The whites where described in reds and the blacks in blues for a while, but later in the book, the blacks were also described in red. This shows how the invisible man changed, how he became invisible.
IM takes us on a journey of the finding of humanity, of conscoius thought, of whole human beings. At the end we can see that the simple boy from the south has changed, but is left at a crossroads and this is where America was left at the time. The racial tension was changing, morphing, becoming so many things and so compounded, but it was not resolved in that time, during IM's time. While those never thought to be human before are finding themselves, there's still a block in the road. While some are changing, others are not, and still others are going backwards. This is a time of turmoil that we find personified in the IM. He's invisible because he's stripped away the definitions society has given to describe lesser beings of the black people, but invisible still because he can't move the next step on his own. He can't make himself visibile, others have to see that there are inivisble people before they can see all the world at all. Others have to see to help make the IM whole. While it is dependent on himself, it is also dependant on others. Let all the invisible people come out of hiding and make their presence known and let us accept their presence. Let us see them human beings in the least.
Whence all this passion towards the conformity to not see some and regards others as objects? Conformity is the downfall of a thinking human being who is unique because of this consciousness. Conformity is for the people seeking an easy answer, a blanket to cover the world and their eyes, a decision that does not require thought but only the limited ability of partial sight. Diversity is the word because it is the world. Escaping reality through limited sight or no sight is the downfall of us all.

Invisible Man, Reactionary Man

IM reacts to ways in the situtations he's been placed in very similiar the feelings and actions of my own. He experiences waves of paranioa when he is in doubt about the organization of the Brotherhood and when he was searching for a job on his own. People piss him off and he learns to control himself, just like a child growing up, which is really apporpriate because society (the white man) made him feel like a child, an imcomplete human being. And people don't realize, this happens to us all the time by others making us feel inferior in some way. They try to exhert their power over others because of various reasons, or just a plain "I think I'm better than you" attitude so that they can push others around. IM feels the pressure of this from all around him, especially when he learns that to be a Brother is to be disciplined.

House of the Spirits

I thouroughly enjoyed the type of story telling Allende used in this text. She kept things mysterious yet did it push it too far to make it rediculous and evoked great feelings at different points in her book. Unfortunately, I felt that during the military coup, the book took on a more historical factual setting rather than still telling a terrifying story of the military uprising sponsered by the Conservatives. It also reminded me of the installment of Soviet Russia and how its people were governed with fear and hostility. The beautiful mystical tale of generations became nothing but unknown terror coming from every level. The way the novel ended seems like it was trying a bit too hard to leave the reader with a bit of the unknown or something to ponder. It could have gone on strong and ended more poingointly than lamenting the possibly of history repeating itself, that Fate was in control and there was nothing Alba could do about it but except that it was going to keep happening over and over again and that there was really no change at all.