Chapter 4 Practice Quiz — Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison — tap or click to flip
Practice Quiz: Chapter 4
What does Mr. Norton ask the narrator to do when they arrive back on campus?
Norton asks to be taken to his guest quarters and instructs the narrator to send Dr. Bledsoe to see him.
Why is Dr. Bledsoe furious with the narrator?
Bledsoe is angry because the narrator failed to control what Mr. Norton saw, allowing a white trustee to witness Jim Trueblood's cabin and the Golden Day rather than shielding him from these realities.
What defense does the narrator offer to Bledsoe, and how does Bledsoe respond?
The narrator protests that Norton himself directed the route and asked to visit the slave quarters. Bledsoe dismisses this, saying any Black man from the South should know how to lie his way out of a white man's foolish orders.
What punishment does Bledsoe initially tell the narrator he will face?
Bledsoe tells the narrator he will be disciplined but does not specify the exact punishment yet. He dismisses the narrator with cold finality.
What is the subject of Reverend Barbee's sermon at the chapel service?
Barbee delivers a rhapsodic, biblical-style sermon about the life of the college's Founder, presenting him as a Moses-like figure who rose from slavery to build the institution through sheer will.
What happens to Reverend Barbee at the end of his sermon?
Barbee stumbles when stepping away from the podium, and his dark glasses fall from his face, revealing that he is physically blind.
How does the audience react to Barbee's sermon?
The students weep, the faculty sit in solemn silence, and even the narrator is deeply moved, temporarily forgetting his catastrophe with Bledsoe.
What does Bledsoe's private confession reveal about how he maintains power?
Bledsoe confesses that he has spent his entire career "acting the nigger"—performing subservience for white benefactors—because that performance is the price of power in a system controlled by white money.
How does Bledsoe describe his relationship to white benefactors?
Bledsoe says he tells white people what to think about Black life, claiming this as a form of agency. However, his power is entirely dependent on maintaining white approval.
How does the narrator's view of Dr. Bledsoe change in this chapter?
The narrator goes from revering Bledsoe as a model of Black achievement and race leadership to seeing him as a manipulator who sacrifices individuals and principles to preserve his own institutional power.
What dual role does Reverend Homer A. Barbee serve in the chapter?
Barbee functions as both a genuine artist in the Black sermonic tradition and an instrument of institutional mythology, using his oratory to sanctify the college and discourage critical questioning.
How does the narrator respond emotionally to the tensions of this chapter?
He is caught between disillusionment from Bledsoe's cynical confession and the seductive comfort of Barbee's mythologizing sermon, unable to fully reconcile the two experiences.
What does Chapter 4 reveal about the theme of power and racial performance?
It shows that Bledsoe performs deference for white benefactors while exercising ruthless control over Black students, revealing the college as a stage where racial uplift is the script written for a white audience.
How does the blindness motif develop in Chapter 4?
Physical blindness (Barbee) mirrors spiritual and political blindness. The most eloquent advocate for the Founder's "vision" cannot see, suggesting that visionary rhetoric and actual perception may be mutually exclusive.
What does Barbee's sermon reveal about mythology as a tool of control?
The sermon transforms the Founder's history into hagiography—a sacred narrative designed to inspire obedience rather than critical thought, functioning as institutional propaganda wrapped in religious rhetoric.
How does Chapter 4 explore the theme of institutional betrayal?
Bledsoe, who is supposed to lead and protect the Black community, reveals he will sacrifice any individual who threatens his institutional power, showing that the system of uplift can become a mechanism of exploitation.
What literary technique does Ellison use in structuring Chapter 4 as a diptych?
Ironic juxtaposition: the first half demolishes the college's idealism through Bledsoe's confession, while the second half reconstructs it through Barbee's sermon, trapping the narrator between disillusionment and seduction.
What is the significance of the allusion in Reverend Barbee's first name, Homer?
It links Barbee to the legendary blind Greek poet Homer, drawing a parallel between Barbee's mythologizing sermon and Homer's epic celebrations of heroic figures, while reinforcing the blindness motif.
What does Barbee's fallen dark glasses symbolize?
The glasses serve as the chapter's culminating symbol, compressing themes of blindness, false vision, and institutional mythology into a single image: the visionary speaker is literally unable to see.
What does "hagiography" mean in the context of Barbee's sermon?
Hagiography refers to a worshipful, uncritical biography, typically of a saint. Barbee's sermon about the Founder is hagiographic because it presents his life as a sacred legend rather than factual history.
What does "Faustian bargain" mean as applied to Dr. Bledsoe?
A Faustian bargain is a deal with the devil in which one gains power or success at a terrible moral cost. Bledsoe has traded his integrity and racial solidarity for institutional authority within a racist system.
What does "diptych" mean as a description of Chapter 4's structure?
A diptych is a work of art in two panels. Chapter 4 functions as a diptych with Bledsoe's brutal revelation forming one panel and Barbee's transcendent sermon forming the other.
Who says "I'll have every Negro in the country hanging on trees by morning if it means staying where I am"?
Dr. Bledsoe says this to the narrator, revealing the extreme lengths to which he would go to maintain his position of power, even invoking the imagery of lynching against his own people.
Who says "The white folk tell everybody what to think—except men like me. I tell them what to think about us"?
Dr. Bledsoe says this, framing his manipulation of white benefactors as a form of agency, though Ellison reveals that this "power" is entirely dependent on the white approval Bledsoe claims to control.