Invisible Man's prologue introduces us to a markedly different style of writing than the naturalism seen in Native Son. It's a first person narrative that makes the writing feel a bit more intimate than an omnipresent third person narrator, and has more of an "unreal" tone with all the metaphors and peculiar descriptions. Class on Tuesday helped me to elucidate my thoughts on how to describe the tone of the novel although now I feel like I'm just repeating what was said there. Anyways, I felt that the tone was dreamlike in the sense that what's being established doesn't seem concrete. We know this person lives in a basement and has many lightbulbs but the complete picture of this guy's current situation is fuzzy around the edges. The narrator is telling the reader about himself but also isn't revealing that much at the same time.
So I thought that the style of the prologue would continue throughout the book but it changes in Chapter 1 and gets more focused. Yet the allusions to dreams still continue, and in a book that is founded on symbolism it makes sense it has a dream-like atmosphere, since people tend to look for the deeper meaning of dreams. Also something subjective I want to note is that the feeling of a dream lingers after one wakes up but trying to translate what you remember of the experience into words isn't always possible. Usually depictions of dreams in writing kind of annoy me because they're too cohesive and straightforward rather than being fragmented. I think the dreams (and hallucination?) that have been described in this novel so far have been an okay mix of relevance and randomness, most notably the one Jim Trueblood had with details like birds coming out of the bed and a tunnel inside a grandfather clock. The white woman in the dream is trying to prevent Trueblood from getting into the clock by grabbing and holding onto him, which scares him because he's afraid of touching a white woman. The taboo nature of this scene is the only thing I can connect to what's happening outside of the dream but there's probably more symbolism that can be gleaned...
