Narrator's Stereotyping Experience in The Invisible Man by HG Wells

Throughout these chapters, the narrator is profoundly self-conscious about his race, about his southern roots, about everything, really. What do episodes like the “pork chop incident” reveal about him? about being Black in America? about being Southern in the North?

I feel as though chapter nine shows the first time that the narrator really embodies his grandfather’s wise words about whites to the narrator’s father about how he should “overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction” (16).

The narrator meets a man names Wheatstraw who speaks in a dialect much less formal than his own starting with a blues song that reminded the narrator of things he would hear back home and saying “”Looka-year, buddy…””” when he first notices the narrator (173).

The narrator, however, seems to be careful not to use language like the man when he replies. He seems to want to try and fit in, I suppose, because he is a college student now and is about to go meet somebody to talk about a recommendation letter that could help him and he probably thinks that his best bet would be to sound and appear as formal as possible.

While at the deli, I thought the conversation the narrator had with the waiter there to be very interesting. The waiter went out of his way to offer him, as a black man, foods that people of his race may stereotypically like, “pork chops, grits, one egg, hot biscuits and coffee” as he said “I would’ve sworn you were a pork chop man”.

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What was even more intriguing to me was that this waiter was purposely doing this to taunt the narrator for being a black man “with a look that seemed to say, There, that ought to excite you, boy” (178).

This starts to worry the narrator because he was trying so seemingly hard to be formal and fit in with the people around him. He was trying not to seem like the type of man that people would expect him to be based on his aesthetic appearance. But then he gets to thinking about how being viewed as different can actually help him. He notes that “it always helped at the college to be a little different, especially if you wished to play a leading role” (178).

This was the part when I really saw the grandfather coming back into the story. The narrator is learning to deal with the fact that he is the type of man that will be stereotyped and that will be talked down to but, at the same time, the type of man that will use those things for his own advantage. He proves his strength to overcome this obstacle by telling the waiter that, instead of the expected meal, “”[he’ll] have orange juice, toast and coffee”” (178). At first, right after this conversation had taken place, the narrator seemed pretty angry and thought “Who does he think he is?” but after re-thinking the situation and what his possible reactions could be toward the waiter, he seems to think about his grandfather’s advice. “The thing to do, [he] thought with a smile, was to give them hints that whatever you did or said was weighted with broad and mysterious meanings that lay just beneath the surface” (178).

Basically he was just thinking that one thing he could have done was fight this guy for being racist and for stereotyping him by offering him specific foods, however, he fought back with a witty answer that threw off the waiter. I felt like, through using what his grandfather – an old man on his deathbed – said, the narrator was growing more clever and more intelligent and it wasn’t just because he was now attending college. It was because he was learning to to deal with situations like this with more control and he was able to trick those who were out to trick him.

This episode of the “pork chop incident” reveals that being black in America during this time will come with nothing more than judgments and stereotypes because of the colour of one’s skin. The narrator is deciding that it is up to him to do with that what he can to make the best out of it. He uses the advice wisely to prove that he can overcome this somewhat of a barrier that separates him from the people around him. As far as being Southern when in the North, the narrator probably made a smart choice by deciding to try and speak so formally toward others. It may have caused him even more prejudice were he to show up in New York speaking like a Southerner, regardless of where in New York he was located.