jack

Invisible Man- Ralph Ellison

Jack the bear. Brother Jack. Jack Rabbit. Ball the jack. Invisible Man is filled with jacks, yet each jack takes on a slightly different role and plays a slightly different part in the narrator’s journey. The most obvious and persistent role is in Brother Jack, the man who draws the narrator into the world of the Brotherhood.

As the narrator finds out when Brother Jack reprimands him for organizing Clifton’s funeral, Brother Jack only has one eye. While this partial sight can represent Brother Jack’s blindness and inability to understand anything more than the partial truth of the world, it also brings in the term one-eyed jack, a term used in poker. The one-eyed royals, which include the two jacks (spades and hearts) and one king (diamonds), can be used as wildcards in poker. This represents Brother Jack’s role quite well as his personality and actions are something of a wildcard. At one moment he is supporting the narrator to become the face of the Brotherhood’s activities and the next he’s sending the narrator to an obscure area to lecture on the “Woman Question.” Not only are Brother Jack’s actions unpredictable, his role in society, and by extension the role of the Brotherhood in society, is never completely fixed. While claiming to help the people, the Brotherhood also finds no problem with abandoning the less powerful for a “greater good.” Even the narrator, part of the Brotherhood, finds it difficult to determine whether the members of the Brotherhood are friends or enemies. However, the one-eyed royals are also the only group of cards that if unified across ranks and suits. Brother Jack advocated the exact same thing in society. The unity of the blacks and the whites, the rich and the poor. Connecting this unity to the unpredictability of Brother Jack and his organization shows that the narrator is wary of the possible effects of uniting people across the boundaries created by society.

The concept of card games is also brought back into the novel by the one-eyed jack, a concept mentioned earlier by the vet who advised the narrator to “play the game, but don’t believe in it.” Through the vet’s word’s, life becomes a game, a game with high stakes, no doubt, but a game nonetheless. But just as the one-eyed jack suggests, there is always a wild card; life cannot be predicted so easily, nor can it be so easily controlled. The game of poker that the one-eyed jack is used in is one based on both luck and skill, clearly indicating that life cannot be controlled by skill alone, as the narrator believed when he first tried to force his way through life in college through hard work and dedication. Yet there is nothing for humans to do other than use what little control they have, leading to the vet’s advice to “play the game.” However, even in playing, the vet tells the narrator, “don’t believe,” hinting to him that the game that society has made life into is nothing more than a sham and therefore, in order to play, he cannot believe. The player must always suspect others while acting himself in order to take part in this grand game of acting and pretending that is life. The key to success in life is the ability to play without being drawn into the lies and to see past into the truth, a truth that the narrator does not find until he stumbles into the world of Rinehart. The wildcards and one-eyed jacks thrown at the narrator throughout him journey are numerous, yet he continues, searching for the truth while trying to play his way through the lies.