"Sybil, my too-late-too-early love"

I've heard and read on Michelle and Mr. Mitchell's blog entries several intriguing takes on the significance of the "Woman Question" and Ellison's portrayal of women as one-dimensional,  over-simplified in their extremity, and peripheral characters in Invisible Man. The possibility that Ellison is marginalizing women deliberately and ironically in order to make a statement is a really interesting suggestion though I find the possibility that the "Woman Question" is on Ellison's periphery of concerns -- and therefore the narrator's -- in reality, valid as well. There's no way to be sure of the author's intentions but I feel that to a degree, it is a balance of the two: Ellison notes the irony of the invisibility of women and incorporates that into the narrator's awareness but at the same time that observation is not of major concern to him or the narrator and as suggested from the characterization of female characters in the novel with a plot driven by male characters, his personal perception of women might actually be pretty misguided.

That said, while still a small, supporting role, and portrayed quite simplistically, Sybil's character and encounter with the narrator is heavy with symbolism and plays a consequential role in the narrator's self discovery in the idea she represents. She serves a purpose to the narrator that goes beyond being irritating and unfathomable. If Jack represents the misguided approach of the Brotherhood and what the narrator once supposed as freedom from the likes of Bledsoe, Sybil stands for the provocativeness and supposed freedom of Rinehart: the blurred lines between truth and lies, reality and fantasy and foreshadows its ultimate insufficiency (I don't think Ellison made an arbitrary choice in naming her Sybil).

The whole encounter between the narrator and Sybil gives off a mood of tragic irony. The narrator invites her to his apartment for the purpose of using her to get information about the Brotherhood and as the night goes on he begins to realize that Sybil similarly intends to use him to fulfill her sexual fantasy. He seems to feel increasingly like he is being turned into a Sambo doll at one point even thinking, "She had me on the ropes." Yet both of them are lost in this scene and lack any true control both of them desperate to make sense in their own way. She has the narrator sing and flex his muscles and he thinks: "I was confounded and amused and it became quite a contest, with me trying to keep the two of us in touch with reality and with her casting me in fantasies in which I was Brother Taboo-with-whom-all-things-are-possible."

The narrator finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish reality from fantasy in his mounting confusion about Sybil and what he desires from her. Although what Sybil suggests horrifies the narrator it moves the narrator in a strange way. He notes the paradox of her -- her innocence in relation to the horror of what she desires, seeming to find a vulnerability in her that he can relate to. He thinks. "But why be surprised when that's what they hear all their lives. When it's made into a great power and they're taught to worship all types of power?" The narrator conveys many ideas with this section but one of them is the tragic invisibility of the fantasy that is Rinehart. Sybil perceives him as the mythical black rapist -- a unreal power society has created -- just as the community has a multitude of false perceptions of Rinehart simply by how he pretends to embody whatever each group in the community want him to embody. When the narrator scrawls, "Sybil you were raped by Santa Claus" over her body, he implies that she does not see him for who he really is but a myth, an invisible man. However, he doesn't seem to blame her for it, seeming to begin to understand how invisible everyone is to each other in society and seeing her as a product of the way society functions.

The narrator continues to marvel at how unknown he is to Sybil, seeming to find her "naivety" and "carefree" attitude enthralling and endearing yet frustrating in its deludedness, thinking. "Was she calling me beautiful or boogieful, beautiful or sublime...I am invisible." Later on Sybil tells him to catch her and he runs, symbolizing the essence of all the ideas that have kept him running and how all of them have inhabited the twisted place between reality and unreality.

When the narrator gets involved with the looting, Sybil seems to remain at the back of his mind the whole time. When the others speak of a white woman starting the commotion he thinks, panicked, "But it couldn't have been Sybil." Later, he stumbles upon the hanging mannequins and thinks, "But are they unreal...are they? What if one, even one is real-- is...Sybil?" With the mention of Sybil, the narrator once again seems to feel the inability to distinguish between what is real and what is not, and feel again the fear of not seeing people, not being seen, losing control of / misinterpreting reality and the validity of certain ideals. In "Sybil," the narrator not only realizes the ultimate emptiness and impossibility of sustaining the self within the deluded freedom and manipulative power of embodying false identities -- yessing them to death in the fashion of Rinehart -- but the blurring between reality and unreality, illusions and disillusionment that has haunted him throughout his whole journey, realizing that he cannot escape the necessity and responsibility of attempting to grasp reality no matter how tempting accepting any one of society's multitude of apparent realities may be.