Oratorie_In_Invisble_Man

=Literary Techniques and Rhetoric Used Throughout IM's Speeches= = =
 * **Affiliations--** Speaker clearly shows allegiance to and pursuit of the agendas of a specific group.
 * **Righteous Indignation**-- The speaker's information is often inaccurate or biased due to his being full of vengeance because of "unjust treatment"
 * **Absolute Certainty**-- Speaker asserts that what they know is absolutely certain and true. In reality, the statement or belief can be based only on self-evidence. The speaker shows no sign of doubt and relates all knowledge to previous "certainties".
 * **Us vs. Them**-- The speaker identifies with one side of a "battle". The other side is often in some way inferior and the speaker highlights the importance of "belonging" to the right side.
 * **Loaded Questions**-- The speaker asks questions which lead the listener into agreement of fallacies or assumptions.
 * **Equivocation**-- The speaker switches the meaning of words and statements in order to justify an argument that would otherwise be found completely incredible. (ex. 1. Only man is rational. 2. No woman is a man. Conclusion: 3. No woman is rational. "Man" is used in 1. in the sense of the human species in comparison to others; in 2. it refers to one of the two human sexes; the argument //equivocates// or switches between them, causing an obviously false conclusion, even though it appears to logically follow.)
 * **Absolutes**-- The speaker uses words such as "don't" and "must" which make his statements indisputable.
 * **Questions**-- The speaker poses questions to the audience but does not expect an answer and rather, provides his own explanation. The audience is likely to accept his explanation which leads the listeners into agreement with his argument.
 * **Emotional Words**-- The speaker uses words that heighten his argument only my arousing emotion and not by providing meaning or understanding. Curses and swear words are often examples of this.
 * **Pacing**-- The speaker uses certain phrases that allow the speech to flow and connect ideas even if they are weakly connected. These phrases include "Naturally...", "Certainly then...", "Surely...", and "Without question..."
 * **Rapport**-- The speaker builds a sense of friendliness and familiarity with the audience through friendly introductions (ex. "my friends"), respect, compliments, optimism, and common "language".
 * **Authority**-- The speaker claims to be in an authoritative position or that he is somehow connected with known authoritative figures.

= = ==

=**Analysis of IM's Speeches**=

“We of the younger generation extol wisdom of that great leader and educator…who first spoke these flaming words of wisdom: ‘A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal: “Water, water; we die of thirst!” The answer from the friendly vessel came back: “Cast down your bucket where you are.” The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket, and it came up full of fresh sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River’ And like him I say, and in the words, ‘To those of my race who depend upon bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the southern white man, who is his next-door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are” cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded…’” In this speech, IM uses no specific speechmaking techniques. This lack of technique emphasizes and is due to his lack of education and his naivete. I think it is also important to note the length (or lack there of) of this speech. The speech was written down and well rehearsed which accounts for its brevity and conciseness when compared to his other more lengthy speeches. There is no sign of emotion in this speech which is apparent in its lack of off-topic tangents and personal wisdom.
 * 1) __Graduation__** __**Speech as Given After the Battle Royal[[image:IMG_5501.jpg width="194" height="169" align="left"]]**__

“Black men! Brothers! Black Brothers! That’s not the way. We’re law-abiding. We’re a law-abiding people and a slow-to-anger people.” “We’re angry but let us be wise…Let us, I mean let us not…Let us learn from that great leader whose wise action was reported in the newspaper the other day…” Let’s follow a leader, let’s organize. //Organize.// We need someone like that wise leader, you read about him, down in Alabama. He was strong enough to choose to do the wise thing in spite of what he felt himself…” “That wise man you read about him, who when that fugitive escaped from the mob and ran to his school for protection, that wise man who was strong enough to do the legal thing, the law-abiding thing, to turn him over to the forces of law and order…” “He was a wise leader, he was within the law. Now wasn’t that the wise thing to do?”… “But wasn’t that the human thing to do? After all, he had to protect himself because--”… “Yes, you’re right. He was wise and cowardly, but what about us? What are we to do?...Look at him,”… “And look at that old couple…”… “And look at their possessions all strewn there on the sidewalk. Just look at their possessions in the snow. How old are you sir?”… “How’s that? Yell so our slow-to-anger brethren can hear you.”… “Did you hear him? He’s eighty-seven. Eighty-seven and look at all he’s accumulated in eighty-seven years, strewn in the snow like chicken guts, and we’re a law-abiding, slow-to-anger bunch of folks turning the other cheek every day in the week. What are we going to do? What would you, what would I, what would he have done? //What is to be done?// I propose we do the wise thing, the law-abiding thing. Just look at this junk! Should two old folks live in such junk, cooped up in a filthy room? It’s a great danger, a fire hazard! Old cracked dishes and broken-down chairs. Yes, yes, yes! Look at that old woman, somebody’s mother, somebody’s grandmother, maybe. We call them ‘Big Mama’ and they spoil us, and—//you// know, //you// remember…Look at her quilts and broken-down shoes. I know she’s somebody’s mother because I saw an old breast pump fall into the snow, and she’s somebody’s grandmother, because I saw a card that read ‘Dear Grandma’…but we’re law-abiding…I looking into a basket and I saw some bones, not neckbones, but some rib bones, knocking bones…This old couple used to dance…I saw—What kind of work do you do, Father?”… “…A day laborer, you heard him, but look at his stuff strewn like chitterlings in the snow…Where has all his labor gone? Is he gone? Is he lying?”… “Then were did his labor go? Look at his old blues records and her pots of plants, they’re down-home folks, and everything tossed out like junk whirled eighty-seven years in a cyclone. Eighty-seven years, and //poof!// Like a snort in a wind storm. Look at them, they look like my mama and papa and my grandma and grandpa, and I look like you and you look like me. Look at them but remember that we’re a wise law-abiding group of people. And remember it when you look up there in the doorway at that law standing there with his forty-five, Look at him, standing with his blue steel pistol and his blue serge suit, or one forty-five, you see ten for every on of us, ten guns and ten warm suits and ten fat bellies and ten million laws. //Laws,// that’s what we call them down South! Laws! And we’re wise, and law-abiding. And look at this old woman with her dog-eared Bible. What’s she trying to bring odd here? She’s let her religion go to her head, but we all know that religion is for the heart, not for the head. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart,’ it says. Nothing about the poor in the head. What’s she trying to do? What about the clear of head? And the clear of eye, the ice-water-visioned who see too clear to miss a lie? Look out there at her cabinet with its gaping drawers. Eighty-seven years to fill them, and full of brick and brack, a brica-brac, and she wants to break the law…What’s happened to them? They’re our people, your people and mine, your parents and mine. What’s happened to ‘em?”… “Dispossessed?”… “That’s a good word, ‘Dispossessed’! ‘Dispossessed,’ eighty-seven years and dispossessed of what? They ain’t //got// nothing, they caint //get// nothing, they never //had// nothing. So who was dispossessed? Can it be us? These old ones are out in the snow, but we’re here with them. Look at their stuff, not a pit to hiss in, nor a window to shout the news and us right with them. Look at them, not a shack to pray in or an alley to sing the blues! They’re facing a gun and we’re facing them. They don’t want the world, but only Jesus. They only want Jesus, just fifteen minutes of Jesus on the rug-bare floor…How about it, Mr. Law? Do we get our fifteen minutes worth of Jesus? You got the world, can we have our Jesus?”… “Look at him, with his blue steel pistol and his blue serge suit. You heard him, he’s the law. He says he’ll shoot us down because we’re law-abiding people. So we’ve been dispossessed, and what’s more, he thinks he’s God. Look up there backed against the post with a criminal on either side of him. Can’t you feel the cold wind, can’t you hear it asking, ‘What did you do with your heavy labor? What did you do?’ When you look at all you haven’t for in eighty-seven years you feel ashamed--”… “Yes, these old folks had a dream book, but the pages went blank and it failed to give them the number. It was called the Seeing Eye, The Great Constitutional Dream Book, The Secrets of Africa, The Wisdom of Egypt—but the eye was blind, it lost its luster. It’s all cataracted like a cross-eyed carpenter and it doesn’t saw straight. All we have is the Bible and this Law here rules that out. So where do we go? Where do we go from here, without a pot--” IM makes this speech as an epitomic example of Righteous Indignation. He was simply a witness of the eviction until he realized that the old couple needed someone to speak up for them against their unjust treatment. While at times he waivers in support, IM maintains the crowd's attention throughout the speech by using these literary techniques. The Us vs. Them, Loaded Questions, Equivocations, and Rapport were extremely important to his success in unifying the crowd. Without too much experience in speechmaking and rallying people together, IM does inadvertently turn the crowd against himself at times, but he redeems himself through the effective implication of these techniques. Even though this eviction provided no specific personal loss or gain to IM, he spoke up against it. For this reason, the Speech represents an emotional benchmark and turning point for IM in the novel.
 * 2) __Eviction Speech__**
 * Techniques used include: Righteous Indignation, Absolute Certainty, Us vs. Them, Loaded Questions, Equivocations, Absolutes, Questions, Rapport

“You know, there are those who that we who are gathered here are dumb. Tell me if I’m right.”… “Yes, they think we’re dumb. They call us the ‘common people.’ But I’ve been sitting here listening and looking and trying to understand what’s so //common// about us. I think they’re guilty of a gross mis-statement of fact—we are the uncommon people--”… “Yes, we’re the uncommon people—and I’ll tell you why. They call us dumb and they treat us dumb. And what do they do with dumb ones? Think about is, look around! They’ve got a slogan and a policy, they’ve got what Brother Jack would call a ‘theory and a practice.’ It’s ‘Never give a sucker an even break!’ It’s dispossess him! Evict him! Use his empty head for a spittoon and his back for a door mat! It’s break him! Deprive him of his wages! It’s use his protest as a sounding brass to frighten him into silence, it’s beat his ideas and his hopes and homely aspirations into a tinkling cymbal! A small, cracked cymbal to tinkle on the Fourth of July! Only muffle it! Don’t let it sound too loud! Beat it in stoptime, give the dumb bunnies the soft-shoe dance! The Big Wormy Apple, the Chicago Get Away, the Shoo Fly Don’t Bother Me! And do you know what makes us so uncommon? //We let them do it!//”… “Dispossession! //Dis-possession// is the word! They’ve tried to dispossess us of our manhood and womanhood! Of our childhood and adolescence—You heard the sister’s statistics on our infant mortality rate. Don’t you know you’re lucky to be uncommonly born? Why, they even tried to dispossess us of //our dislike of being dispossessed!// And I’ll tell you something else—if we don’t resist, pretty soon they’ll succeed! These are the days of dispossession, the season of homelessness, the time of evictions. We’ll be dispossessed of the very brains in our heads! And we’re so //un-//common that we can’t even see it! Perhaps we’re too polite. Perhaps we don’t care to look at unpleasantness. They think we’re blind—//un­-//commonly blind. And I don’t wonder. Think about it, they’ve dispossessed us each of one eye from the day we’re born. SO now we can only see in straight white lines. We’re a nation of one-eyed mice—Did you ever see such a sight in your life? Such an //un-//common sight!”… “You know, if we aren’t careful, they’ll slip up on our blind sides and—//plop!// Out goes our last good eye and we’re blind as bats! Someone’s afraid we’ll see something. Maybe that’s why so many of our fine friends are present tonight—blue steel pistols and blue serge suits and all! But I believe one eye is enough to lose without resistance and I think that’s your belief. So let’s get together. Dud you ever notice, my dumb one-eyed brothers, how two totally blind men can get together and help one another along? They stumble, they bump into things, but they avoid dangers too; they get along. Let’s get together, uncommon people. With both our eyes we may see what makes us so uncommon, we’ll see //who// make us so uncommon! Up to now we’ve been like a couple of one-eyed men walking down opposite sides of the street. Someone starts throwing bricks and we start blaming each other and fighting among ourselves. But we’re mistaken! Because there’s a third party present. There’s a smooth, oily scoundrel running down the //middle// of the wide fray steer throwing stones—he’s the one! He’s doing the damage! He claims he needs the space—he calls it his //freedom//. And he knows he’s got us on our blind side and he’s been popping away till he’s got us silly—//uncommonly// silly! In fact, //his// freedom has got us damn-nigh blind! Hush now, don’t call no names! I say hell with this guy! I say come on, cross over! Let’s make and alliance! I’ll look out for you, and you look out for me! I’m good at catching and I’ve got a damn good pitching arm!”… “Look at me! I haven’t lived here long. Times are hard, I’ve known despair. I’m from the South, and since coming here I’ve known eviction. I’d come to distrust the world…But look at me now, something strange is happening. I’m here before you. I must confess…”… “May I confess? You are my friends. We share a common disinheritance, and it’s said that confession is good for the soul. Have I your permission?”… “Silence is consent, so I’ll have it out, I’ll confess it! //Something strange and miraculous and transforming is taking place in me right now…as I stand here before you!//”… “Let me describe it. It is something odd. It’s something that I’m sure I’d never experience anywhere else in the world. I feel your eyes upon me. I hear the pulse of your breathing. And now, at this moment, with your black and white eyes upon me, I feel…I feel…”… “I feel, I feel suddenly that I have become //more human//. Do you understand? More human. Not that I have become a man, for I was born a man. But that I am more human. I feel strong, I feel able to get things done! I feel that I can see sharp and clear and far down the dim corridor of history and in it I can hear the footsteps of militant fraternity! No, wait, let me confess…I feel the urge to affirm my feelings…I feel that here, after a long and desperate and uncommonly blind journey, I have come home…Home! With your eyes upon me I feel that I’ve found my true family! My true people! My true country! I am a new citizen of the country of your vision, a native of your fraternal land. I feel that here tonight, in this old arena, the new is being born and the vital old revived. In each of you, in me, in us all. SISTERS! BROTHERS! WE ARE THE TRUE PATRIOTS! THE CITIZENS OF TOMORROWS’S WORLD! WE’LL BE DISPOSSESSED NO MORE!" The Invisible Man uses these techniques to impress the Brotherhood and get the people rallied together to achieve a common goal. He knows that this is going to decide how far he gets within the Brotherhood and if he continues with his speech making or not. This is his way of bring accepted by the people in his community, his main way of doing this was through the use of affiliation and the idea of us vs. them, that way the audience is able to relate to him and feel some kind of association with him. They also get to trust him after he uses absolute certainty because he makes them have confidence in him. He really gets into the speech and starts to become very emotional, using the emotional words. This is very different from what the Brotherhood wanted. After all the rhetorical sciences that he had been taught over the past four years, he started out using the learned techniques, however emotion started to take over and he lost the techniques that he was once taught. In the beginning of the speech, he is very composed and learned while towards the end his speech becomes more spontaneous and more emotional. This is very different than what he was taught, they wanted him to follow a certain structure that was written on his note cards, however as he became more emotional and he started having double vision he neglected to read the note cards and use the techniques that he learned. His speech was not taken well among the Brotherhood and they believed that he provided more danger than benefit.
 * 3) __Brotherhood Speech[[image:BookerT.jpg align="left"]]__**
 * Techniques used include: Affiliation, Absolute Certainty, Us vs. Them, Equivocation, Absolutes, Questions, Emotional Words, Rapport, Authority

“What are you waiting for me to tell you? What good will it do? What if I sat that this isn’t a funeral, that it’s a holiday celebration, that id you stick around the band will end up playing ‘Damit-the-Hell-the Fun’s All Over’? Or do you expect to see some magic, the dead rise up and walk again? Go home, he’s as dead as he’ll ever die. That’s the end in the beginning and there’s no encore. There’ll be no miracles and there’s no one here to preach a sermon. Go home, forget him. He’s inside this box, newly dead. Go home and don’t think about him. He’s dead and you’ve got all you can do to think about you…I’ve told you to go home, but you keep standing there. Don’t you know it’s hot out here in the sun? So what if you wait for what little I can tell you? Can I say in twenty minutes what was building twenty-one years and ended in twenty seconds? What are you waiting for, when all I can’t tell you is his name? And when I tell you, what will you know that you didn’t know already, except perhaps his name? All right, you do the listening in the sun and I’ll try to tell you in the sun. Then you go home and forget it. Forget it. His name was Clifton and they shot him down. His name was Clifton and he was tall and some folks thought him handsome. And though he didn’t believe it, I think he was. His name was Clifton and his face was black and his hair was think with tight-rolled curls—or call them naps or kinks. He’s dead, uninterested, and, except to a few young girls, it doesn’t matter…Have you got it? Can you see him? Think of your brother or your cousin John. His lips were thick with an upward curve at the corners. He often smiled. He had good eyes and a pair of fast hands, and he had a heart. He thought about things and he felt deeply. I won’t call him noble because what’s such a word to do with one of us? His name was Clifton, Tod Clifton, and, like any man, he was born of woman to live awhile and fall and die. So that’s his tale to the minute. His name was Clifton and for a while he lived among us and aroused a few hopes in the young manhood of man, wand we who knew him loved him and he died. So why are you waiting? You’ve heard it all. Why wait for more, when all I can do is repeat it? Very well, so I’ll tell you. His name was Clifton and he was young and he was a leader and when he fell there was a hole in the heel of his sock and when he stretched forward he seemed not as tall as when he stood. So he died; and we who loved him are gathered here to mourn him. It’s as simple as that and as short as that. His name was Clifton and he was black and they shot him. Isn’t that enough to appease your thirst for drama and send you home to sleep it off? Go take a drink and forget it. Or read it in //The Daily News//. His name was Clifton and they shot him, and I was there to see him fall. So I know it as I know it. Here are the facts. He was standing and he fell. He fell and he kneeled. He kneeled and he bled. He bled and he died. He fell like a heap like any man and his blood spilled out like any blood; //red// as any blood, wet as any blood and reflecting the sky and the buildings and birds and trees, or your face if you’d looked into its dulling mirror—and it dried in the sun as blood dries. That’s all. They spilled his blood and he bled. They cut him down and he died; the blood plowed on the walk in a pool, gleamed a while, and, after a while, became dull then dusty, then dried. That’s the story and that’s how it ended. It’s an old story and there’s been too much blood to excite you. Besides, it’s only important when it fills the veins of a living man. Aren’t you tired of such stories? Aren’t you sick of the blood? Then why listen, why don’t you go? It’s got out here. There’s the odor of embalming fluid. The beer is cold in the taverns, the saxophones will be mellow at the Savoy; plenty good-laughing-lies will be told in the barber shops and beauty parlors; and there’ll be sermons in two hundred churches in the cool of the evening, and plenty of laughs as the movies. Go listen to ‘Amos and Andy’ and forget it. Here you have only the same old story. There’s not even a young wife up here in red to mourn him. There’s nothing here to pity, no one to break down and shout. Nothing to give you that good old frightened feeling. The story’s too short and too simple. His name was Clifton, Tod Clifton, he was unarmed and his death was as senseless as his life was futile. He had struggled for Brotherhood on a hundred street corners and he thought it would make him more human, but he died like any dog in a road. All, all right, listen to me standing up on this so-called mountain! Let me tell it as it truly was! His name was Tod Clifton and he was full of illusions. He thought he was a man when he was only Tod Clifton. He was shot for a simple mistake of judgment and he bled and his blood dried and shortly the crowd trampled out the stains. It was a normal mistake of which many are guilty: He thought he was a man and that men were not meant to be pushed around. But it was hot downtown and he forgot his history, he forgot the time and the place. He lost his hold on reality. There was a cop and a waiting audience but he was Tod Clifton and cops are everywhere. The cop? What about him? He was a cop. A good citizen. But this cop had an itching finger and an eager ear for a word that rhymed with ‘trigger,’ and when Clifton fell he had found it. The Police Special spoke its lines and the rhyme was completed. Just look around you. Look at what he made, look inside you and feel his awful power. It was perfectly natural. The blood ran like blood in a comic-book killing, on a comic-book street in a comic-book town on a comic-book day in a comic-book world. Tod Clifton’s one with the ages. But what’s that to do with you in this hear under this veiled sun? Now he’s part of history, and he has received his true freedom. Didn’t they scribble his name on a standardized pad? His Race: colored! Religion: unknown, probably born Baptist. Place of birth: U.S. Some southern town. Next of kin: unknown. Address: unknown. Occupation: unemployed. Cause of dead (be specific): resisting reality in the form of a .38 caliber revolver in the hands of the arresting officer, on Forty-second between the library and the subway in the heat of the afternoon, of gunshot wounds received from three bullets, fired at three paces, one there, the other severing the spinal ganglia traveling downward to lodge in the pelvis, the other breaking through the back and traveling God knows where. Such was the short bitter life of Brother Tod Clifton. Now he’s in this box with the bolts tightened down. He’s in the box and we’re in there with him, and when I’ve told you this you can go. It’s dark in this box and it’s crowded. It has rats and roaches, and it’s far, far too expensive a dwelling. The air is bad and it’ll be cold this winter. Tod Clifton is crowded and he needs the room. ‘Tell them to get out of the box,’ that’s what he would say if you could hear him. ‘Tell them to get out of the box and go teach the cops to forget that rhyme. Tell them to teach them that when they call you //nigger// to make a rhyme with //trigger// it makes the gun backfire.’ So there you have it. In a few hours Tod Clifton will be cold bones in the ground. And don’t be fooled, for these bones shall not rise again. You and I will still be in the box. I don’t know if Tod Clifton had a soul. I only know the ache that I feel in my heart, my sense of loss. I don’t know if //you// have a soul. I only know that you are men of flesh and blood; and that blood will spill and flesh grow cold. I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers. And I know too how we are labeled. So in the name of Brother Clifton beware of the triggers; go home, keep cool, stay safe away from the sun. Forget him. When he was alive he was our hope, but why worry over a hope that’s dead? So there’s only one thing left to tell and I’ve already told it. His name was Tod Clifton, he believed in Brotherhood, he aroused our hopes and he died.” These emotional words and techniques that he uses were nothing that he learned about in the Brotherhood. It was very much like his first Brotherhood speech which they would have never accepted. At this time, he is also struggling with his identity and his so-called friends in the Brotherhood. He wants people to just forget about Clifton, like the idea that Clifton was invisible. He was very repetitive within this speech, giving more and more detail each time he repeated it. In a way, each time he repeated it, he started to accept it more. He also blames the community that they didn't do anything to save him. By asking all the questions that he does, he feels like he is not connecting efficiently to the audience because it holds no political substance. The result from this funeral speech and the effect that it has had on the Invisible Man is that he starts to see individual people, not just groups of people with blurred faces. This shows his change from the Brotherhood because they taught him about making speeches to groups of people and huge audiences. It also shows his freedom because he didn't need to ask the Brotherhood's permission to give the speech and he did not care about the techniques that were taught to him when he first joined the Brotherhood.
 * 4) __Funeral Speech[[image:B_T_W.jpg width="229" height="269" align="left"]]__**
 * Techniques used include: Us vs. Them, Questions, Emotional Words

=**How The Speeches Show IM's Growth**=

These speeches shows his growth in identity and who he trusts. The speech at the Battle Royal is well rehearsed and he is very naive about the reaction he gets. The white men give him the scholarship to the Negro College so that they would be able to mold him into what they want him to be. At this stage, he wants to be one of the white men with their power. The eviction speech, he starts to relate to the black people in his community and believe that they should stand up to the white man and the law and fight for what they want, equality. For the Brotherhood speech he is trying to connect both the black and white men, however he is still under control of the white man and still trying to impress them. The funeral speech allows him to let go of the Brotherhood, and the white man. It also allows him to let go of everything he has learned in the past and everyone who lied to him. After the funeral speech, he finally detaches himself from the past and realizes his true identity, that he is actually invisible.

=Works Cited=

Myers, Gene. "Persuasive words, Logical fallacies and Intent signals." 12 Feb 2008 <[|http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~gmyers/esssa/rhetoric.html>.]
 * Jacobs, D. T. (1994). //The bum's rush: The selling of environmental backlash.// Boise, ID: Legendary.
 * Thomas, S. N. (1977). //Logical reasoning in natural language.// Seattle: ASUW.