Men of Venom

The scene in Invisible Man where the main character describes his experience delivering his speech for the town’s leaders is shocking. The imagery of the entire scene is incredible, and the unbelievable actions of people who are supposed to be respectable and decent are made believable. 

The main character’s fear of the situation is made apparent with:

“But now I felt a sudden fit of blind terror. I was unused to darkness. It was as though I had suddenly found myself in a dark room filled with poisonous cottonmouths. I could hear the bleary voices yelling insistently for the battle to begin” (21).

Here the narrator calls reference to his home full of light, which we learned about in the prologue with the terror that he feels without light. We begin to see how the character’s experiences shape him into the man who introduced the story. He is terrified of being blind and does not like darkness, so when he is out of this part of his life he fills everything he knows with lightness.

He also expresses his fear, in that moment, of the powerful white men that surround him. He has seen them drunkly follow their impulses with the blonde dancer, and he knows that he is not safe. The narrator knows that he cannot trust the people he is surrounded by because they are compulsive and greedy. They are only looking out for their own entertainment. It is curious that our character calls the men he is afraid of ‘cottonmouths’ because cottonmouth snakes are usually dark in colour, while the men he fears are white. Cottonmouth snakes have white mouths, so perhaps he was referring to the venom that comes out of them.