Nature vs. Nurture in Invisible Man, Absalom, and Clockers

Introduction: Society as the Shaping Force

What makes us who we are? The diverse narratives of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, and Richard Price's Clockers all arrive at the same conclusion. Although a human being may possess an ordinary, fallen, or noble nature, it is ultimately that person's social environment that shapes the path of his or her life. Regardless of original intentions, no one can escape the influence of peers and societal judgments about such personal characteristics as race and class. This recalls the oft-cited psychological observation that "genetics provides the bullet, but society pulls the trigger." In other words, society is the force that propels human destiny, even when the individual possesses an essentially good or bad nature.

Race and Invisibility in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

The life of Ralph Ellison's protagonist in Invisible Man is constrained by his society's constructs of racism and by the dictates of how a Black man should live and act. He lives as a virtual hermit, in fear of White society, taking comfort only in the electric illumination of his room. "I am nobody but myself," he says, believing that shutting out all other human beings is the only way to escape the fact that he is an "invisible man" — a persecuted and placeless Black man in contemporary America (Ellison 1). Gradually, the reader comes to know his story through a series of flashbacks.

Clearly, the protagonist possessed considerable intellectual and academic gifts at the beginning of his life. He was awarded a scholarship to a prestigious college — or rather, the most prestigious college African Americans were permitted to attend during that era of Southern history. But even to win this coveted scholarship, society forced him to acknowledge his supposed inferior place as a Black man. He and his fellow students were compelled to engage in a kind of wrestling match for dollars, a "Battle Royal," staged for the entertainment of Whites. Rather than taking pride in what he had earned academically, he was forced to feel shame for who he was as a human being. Symbolically, the fight begins "blindfolded": the White spectators can gaze upon the young Black men about to engage in combat, but the fighters cannot look back or recognize the Whites as individuals, since White influence in society is so pervasive and unexamined (Ellison 8). Black men are reduced to objects, stripped of their clothes and their characters — society's cruel rules affect the protagonist, but the White spectators remain insulated, their individual identities intact.

This shame carried over into the young Black student's college career. As the protagonist shows a wealthy White donor around the campus, the reader sees how he has internalized the fears, hatreds, and prejudices of White society — he reacts negatively even to members of his own race. When the two encounter other Black people, the narrator recalls feeling fearful and apologetic at the sight of African Americans drinking, even though their behavior is no worse than what transpired at the "Battle Royal" that enabled him to earn his scholarship in the first place. Despite the Black student's sense of shame, he cannot escape the social impact of prejudice in the way he perceives the world. As a result of his unintentional error in taking the donor to an inappropriate establishment, he is expelled from school. This is another indication of how the genuinely good character of this young man goes unrecognized, and how his destiny is entirely shaped by deep-rooted historical prejudice and social circumstance.

The fact that his words and deeds have no impact upon his environment also clearly damages the narrator, making him grow increasingly timid. Later, the college rebukes him: "Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie! What kind of an education are you getting around here?" (Ellison 125). His education, in other words, is not meant to advance him but to keep him in his social place and to instill within him the negative constructs of Blackness that his society demands, regardless of his personal gifts.

Eventually, the narrator moves to the North and becomes affiliated with Harlem communists. He is not genuinely in ideological sympathy with their economic program, and he ultimately leaves their fold. Ellison suggests that the only reason the narrator found communism attractive at all was because society offered African Americans so few venues to express their rage at White society. The available choices were stark: acquiescence — which had not bought the young college student an education — or rage and rioting in reaction to racist oppression, each carrying its own destructive costs. Ultimately, the narrator wishes to choose neither slavish devotion to Whites nor adherence to a totalitarian ideology. But since he refuses both, he is left with nothing — no society at all, only invisibility. Whites do not acknowledge his humanity, and the Harlem communists regard him as a dupe if he does not subscribe entirely to their ideology.

Class, Whiteness, and Ambition in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom

In Absalom, Absalom, the reader encounters the reverse equation of Southern society from the one presented in Ellison's narrative. The main protagonist of the Faulkner novel, Thomas Sutpen, is a cruel man — crass and utterly lacking the quiet, if thwarted, nobility of Ellison's invisible man. Because of his impoverished upbringing, he is determined to purchase social prestige by accumulating wealth and instilling fear in others — in both his slaves and his family. As a poor White man, Sutpen is despised by his wealthier neighbors. Like Ellison's protagonist, this hatred fuels him to succeed. But the avenues open to a White man in the South are far different from those available to a Black man. Sutpen is far more economically mobile than Ellison's narrator, and he constructs an estate through the exploitation of slaves in the West Indies.

The reason Sutpen chooses this path traces back to one of the formative episodes of his life, rooted in the dynamics of White-Black relations. When the young Sutpen came calling at his new, aristocratic Southern neighbor's house, the man's Black servant told him to go around to the back — an instruction Sutpen read as a reflection of his low birth. He was outraged to be treated as lower than a Black servant. Believing himself superior because he was White, Sutpen used his rage to build wealth: to accumulate enough money to own slaves of his own, so he could oppress Black people as richer Whites had oppressed him.

Although Sutpen achieves his dreams of wealth, not all of his aspirations are fulfilled. One of his sons dies. Another becomes a fugitive after murdering his brother. Sutpen's drive to control his world — though he is granted far more opportunity to do so than Ellison's narrator and commands greater fear and respect from those around him — ultimately comes to no greater fruition than that of a Black man in a comparable situation. Even the determined Sutpen cannot evade the forces of fate, such as the Civil War. Nor can he eradicate from his heart the prejudices of his time, which cause him to reject Bon, his son of mixed race, leaving himself without an heir. Sutpen is deeply hypocritical: "half-breed" servants populate his house, evidence of sexual transgressions between supposedly purer Whites and supposedly inferior Blacks. Yet he feels free to "kick and curse" these persons like animals, because society deems it acceptable and because such treatment and racial separation are the accepted practices of his world (Faulkner 199). He cannot forget that first humiliation at the front door, and it colors every subsequent interaction with Black people — even if he may feel sexual desire, he cannot forget "it was the nigger [who] told him, even before he had had time to say what he came for, never to come to that front door again but to go around to the back" (Faulkner 290).

Conclusion: Self-Fulfilling Prophecies and the Limits of Character

These books do not present utterly helpless visions of human character. All three protagonists possess basic impulses that make them more than mere pawns: the desire to become educated, to gain social esteem in the eyes of their peers, and to make something of their lives. But society limits the reach of their aspirations, and the way others perceive them — as Black, as low-class, as destined for nothing but crime — essentially becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Genetics may load the gun, but it is the social environment that pulls the trigger, and in each of these three American novels, the trigger is pulled.

Works Cited

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1995.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom. New York: Vintage Reissue, 1991.

Price, Richard. Clockers. New York: Harper Paperbacks, 2001.