We’ve talked about it before, we’ll talk about it in the future. But I want to talk about it now: What’s up with this Rinehart character. Rinehart is never met in the book - we just know him through our narrator as he’s walking the streets of Harlem. Everyone recognizes the narrator as Rinehart, but sees him in many different forms: a pimp, a preacher, etc. This imagery seems kind of obvious -- playing off the idea of our narrator questioning his own identity and working through his atmospherical and inner changes as well as the misconceptions that other people have of him. It also seems to show that people are so easy to accept our narrator as completely invisible -- not even being the wind or the water -- just being nothing. That’s scary in a way. But I think the Rinehart character stands for more than just an obvious metaphor reflecting our narrator’s life. I think he serves as an example of a character that is consciously invisible.
Our narrator seems to be struggling to be this, and by the end of the book he realizes he has been invisible throughout his whole story . But then the book is over, and he is still underground, so we, as the reader, don’t completely see his understanding of his conscious invisibility. Rinehart is a consciously individual character, but isn’t given much space to show himself in the book, in the same way. So, in a way, Ellison is telling the reader that he has to restrict this space so that we can understand the plight of our narrator. If there was a character that was strong, central, and constant in the book that also exhibited conscious invisibility, our narrator wouldn’t have to fight or struggle in the same way that he does. And also, that character might not be so invisible anyway.
Perhaps Ellison is deceiving us throughout the book -- in the same way our narrator is constantly being deceived. We don’t really get to taste what our narrator’s success looks like (if it is “success), and so we have to see our narrator through other eyes.
I definitely think that the fluid identity that the narrator experiences as Rinehart brings invisibility to the foreground. It also portrays this in a very positive light, as we see the narrator really enjoying his "celebrity status." It amazes him that something as simple as a pair of tinted sunglasses could give him such power, almost as if he's cheating the system. He's taking on a new name! A new identity! It is much like the new identity assigned to him by the Brotherhood, except this was not forced on him by anyone -- it's subversive. This newfound power is a turning point, in which the narrator comes to covet invisibility. From this point on, we see a quick descent of his ideals from wanting to be a well-known moneymaking leader to his state at the end of the novel.
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