The Fine Line Between Sanity and Insanity

            Chapter two of Invisible Man begins with the Narrator remembering his college days and taking us on what almost seems to be a scenic tour of the campus. One seemingly small detail in his description is the insane asylum. Though this could appear extraneous – the reason I noticed it in the first place was because of how matter-of-fact and nonchalantly the Narrator mentioned it – I think that the insane asylum is actually an important detail in understanding the narrator and his circumstances.   

How the grass turned green in the springtime and how the mocking birds fluttered their tails and sang, how the moon shone down on the buildings, how the bell in the chapel tower rang out the precious short-lived hours; how the girls in bright summer dresses promenaded the grassy lawn. Many times, here at night, I’ve closed my eyes and walked along the forbidden road that winds past the girls’ dormitories, past the hall with the clock in the tower, its windows warmly aglow . . . on up the road, past the buildings, with the southern verandas half-a-city-block long, to the sudden forking, barren of buildings, birds, or grass, where the road turned off to the insane asylum.

There is a certain irony to the insane asylum being placed directly next to the college campus. Our Narrator has come to the college in order to learn, expand his horizons and prepare to get a prestigious job one day, so it seems a little foreboding that just a wrong turn away is a building for the housing and care of people who once shared many of the same aspirations as the narrator, but for one reason or another have been deemed insane.

            We get a little more insight into the meaning of the insane asylum in chapter three, when the Narrator and Mr. Norton encounter some of its patients at the Golden Day. Though the men are all patients, that’s not the way they see themselves; they consider themselves primarily doctors, composers, chemists, students, psychiatrists etc., and we see the Narrator get more and more uncomfortable as the fine line between crazy and sane, perhaps symbolized by the asylum’s proximity to the college, begins to blur. One conversation that represents this especially well is that between the Narrator, Mr. Norton and the doctor in which after diagnosing Mr. Norton and explaining how he gained his medical knowledge, the doctor describes invisibility and blindness similarly to how the Narrator does in the prologue.

“You see,” he said turning to Mr. Norton, “he has eyes and ears and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life. Understand. Understand? It’s worse than that. He registers with his senses but short-circuits his brain. Nothing has meaning. He takes it in but he doesn’t digest it. Already he is - well, bless my soul! Behold! A walking zombie! Already he’s learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He’s invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams sir! The mechanical man!”

The Narrator says he doesn’t understand, and worried, confused and dismissing the doctor as insane, tries to hurry Mr. Norton back out to the car. The conversation continues for a little longer, but when the doctor realizes neither the Narrator nor Mr. Norton understand what he is saying, he ends the discussion, threatening to bash their heads in if they don’t leave and “leaning against the wall making a sound that was a blending of laughter and tears.” This seemed to echo the scene in the prologue where the Narrator describes his invisibility to the reader, and then beats up a man in the street and runs away laughing.

The similarities between the doctor and the Narrator, the sense of foreboding created by the image of the insane asylum and its proximity to the college, and the gradual blurring of the line between sanity and insanity throughout the first few chapters are causing me to begin to wonder how sane the narrator actually is by the time he is able to recognize his invisibility.