Mrs. Dalton, the woman who owns the house where Bigger works, is blind and ethereal and dressed in white clothing. Her appearance operates metaphorically, suggesting the she and other white people are blind to the individuality of Bigger and other black people. For instance, she is quite interested in helping black people, but she wants to help them the way she thinks they need to be helped. After she talks to Bigger about going to school, Bigger “felt that Mrs. Dalton wanted him to do the things she felt that he should have wanted to do.”
Native Son – 5
Native Son – 8
Bigger thinks because he is black, Mrs. Dalton would not have been suspected of being in her daughter’s bedroom. He believes he isn’t factored into Mrs. Dalton’s thinking in that kind of social situation, and this makes her and other white people figuratively blind, in the same way that Mrs. Dalton his literally blind.
Native Son – 12
Bigger feels secure in the fact that Mrs. Dalton won’t ask him certain questions about her daughter because “She would be ashamed to let him think that something was so wrong in her family that she had to ask him, a black servant, about it.” This maintenance of distance between people that is based on race and class keeps Bigger from being suspected of his crime. It keeps him Invisible.
Native Son – 13
The word “invisible” comes up often as Bigger thinks about what he’s done. Bigger reflects on the fact that by killing Mary, “he had shed an invisible burden he had long carried” and that the act had made him realize that “his hands held weapons that were invisible.” Of his girlfriend, Bigger says “Bessie, too, was very blind” and he has a similar impression of his family, becoming emboldened when he sees “how blind they were.” Other people’s “blindness” makes him invisible.
Native Son – 14
Bigger is proud of the agency he feels behind his invisibility. He boasts to his girlfriend, Bessie, that people won’t suspect him of his crime, saying “They won’t think we did [it]. They don’t think we got guts enough to do it. They think niggers is too scared…”
Native Son – 18
As Bigger hears Mrs. Dalton’s grief over the disappearance of her daughter, he feels safe because he knows he’s “invisible” to her, but he also “felt that he was living upon a high pinnacle where bracing winds whipped about him.” This can be compared to Kant’s notion of the sublime.
Invisible Man: 1
In the prologue of the novel, the main character writes “I remember that I am invisible and walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones.” This reference to sleeping people brings to mind the people Ta-nehisi Coates refers to as “the Dreamers” in Between the World and Me.
Invisible Man: 3
When the protagonist is awarded a scholarship to a black college, he pauses before a statue of the founder of the school lifting a veil from the face of a kneeling slave. This veil can be associated with DuBois’s concept of the veil that separates people of different races in the U.S., and the fact that the slave has been blinded by the covering ties in to the novel’s themes of visibility and invisibility. Most profoundly though, the protagonist is “puzzled” by the statue, “unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place.”