Right before the invisible man is introduced to Mr. Kimbro the office boy states that people around the factory call him the "Colonel", which sets the tone for how Mr. Kimbro is going to run the operation. To further show how the office boy feels about Mr. Kimbro he calls him a "slave driver" when he is leaving, an obvious statement how Mr. Kimbro works his people. When Mr. Kimbro is telling the invisible man what to do he tells him explicitly to "follow instructions" and do "exactly what I tell you" (199). Between what the office boy has said about Mr. Kimbro and how Mr. Kimbro is acting towards the invisible man, the invisible man must feel like he has been just thrown back into the racist southern states. This in turn must be confusing for him because he came to New York to get away from the stereotypical white man who is telling black

s what to do. And now here is a white man doing the exact thing that he has been trying to get away from. To further reinforce the readers view of how the invisible man is feeling he calls Mr. Kimbro a "a flunkey, a northern redneck, a Yankee cracker!" (201). This shows the audience that the invisible man is disturbed by his boss and wants to know where a black man can be treated equally.

Next Mr. Kimbro shows him that he has to add ten drops of dope to make the mixture even whiter. However, this confuses the invisible man because inside the white graduate the liquid was "dead black". In this scene I believe that the white society is shown as the graduate and blacks as the paint. Thus the dope, blacks, are used to make the mixture, society, better. Meaning, that in society the blacks were used as labors to make the country look better. But because the American society, government, ambassadors, ext...are represented by white men, the blacks working hard is making the whites look better. To further reinforce this point, Ellison chooses to graduate to be the color white. This is because the graduate holds the black dope together and thus shows the whites holding the blacks together. Furthermore, the graduate(whites) are responsible for adding blacks were ever they feel works needs to be done.

The smartness of this scene and more broadly the book is its ability to exist on many levels. Ellison being able to portray the issue of race and ineq

Some common words found in the essay are:
Kimbro Kimbro, Liberty Paints, , office boy, society invisible, american culture, american society, dope mixture, invisible man's, white graduate, white society, heavy oils, meaning society,
Approximate Word count = 985
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)