Plot Summary
Chapter 5 of Invisible Man takes place entirely within the college chapel during the weekly vespers service. The narrator, still anxious from the disastrous events of the preceding chapters—driving Mr. Norton to Jim Trueblood’s cabin and the chaos at the Golden Day—sits among the student body, faculty, and white trustees. Dr. Bledsoe presides over the ceremony with practiced authority, his commanding presence radiating the institutional power he holds over everyone in attendance.
The service builds toward its centerpiece: a sermon delivered by Reverend Homer A. Barbee, a visiting preacher from Chicago. Barbee’s address is not a conventional religious homily but an elaborate, mythologized narrative about the college’s Founder. He tells the Founder’s story as a sacred epic, beginning with the man’s birth into slavery and his early hunger for knowledge. In Barbee’s account, the Founder is a Moses figure who led his people out of darkness into the light of education, walking across the South as a young freedman to find learning, enduring poverty and violence along the way.
The sermon grows increasingly dramatic as Barbee recounts a critical episode: the Founder, traveling by train to raise funds for the school, falls gravely ill and is removed from the train at a desolate station. Former students find him near death, nurse him back to health, and carry him home. Barbee renders this scene with the imagery and cadences of a biblical resurrection. The congregation responds with the fervor of a revival meeting—students weep openly, and the white trustees sit in moved silence. The narrator himself is swept up in the emotional tide, feeling both personal guilt and collective reverence.
Then comes the chapter’s pivotal moment. As Barbee steps away from the podium, he stumbles and nearly falls. His dark glasses are momentarily displaced, and the narrator sees with a shock that Reverend Barbee is blind. The man who has just delivered an elaborate sermon celebrating vision, sight, and the Founder’s prophetic ability to see what others could not is himself unable to see at all. The chapter closes with this revelation hanging in the air, its implications not yet fully processed by the narrator but unmistakable to the reader.
Character Development
Reverend Homer A. Barbee dominates this chapter as both a character and a symbol. His name directly evokes Homer, the legendary blind poet of ancient Greece, signaling that his blindness is central to his function in the narrative. Barbee is a master rhetorician whose blindness does not diminish his power but rather intensifies it—he has perfected the art of projecting a vision he cannot verify. Dr. Bledsoe appears as the orchestrator of the service, controlling which stories are told and how, displaying his authority through staging rather than speech. The narrator remains a passive, reverent observer, still believing in the institution’s mythology even as Ellison provides readers every reason to doubt it. His emotional response to the sermon—weeping and feeling his guilt simultaneously validated and deepened—shows how thoroughly the college’s ideological apparatus has shaped his identity.
Themes and Motifs
The chapter is constructed around the opposition of vision and blindness, the novel’s most persistent motif. Barbee’s sermon celebrates the Founder’s sight—his ability to envision a better future—yet the preacher delivering this message is literally blind, and the congregation absorbing it is figuratively so. The mythology of the Founder functions as a mechanism of institutional control: by casting the college’s origins in sacred, quasi-biblical terms, the administration transforms obedience into reverence and discourages critical thinking. The motif of performance and spectacle continues from the Battle Royal—the chapel service is another carefully staged event where emotional manipulation substitutes for truth. The theme of blind faith is physically embodied in Barbee, whose allegiance to the Founder’s ideology is as literal as it is spiritual.
Literary Devices
Ellison employs dramatic irony throughout the chapter: the reader perceives the contradiction between Barbee’s blindness and his vision-centered sermon before the narrator does. The allusion to Homer connects Barbee to the Western tradition of the blind seer—the figure whose lack of physical sight supposedly grants deeper spiritual insight—and then subverts it, since Barbee serves an institutional agenda rather than prophetic truth. The sermon itself is rendered as an extended allegory, with the Founder’s story paralleling the Exodus narrative and the resurrection of Christ. Ellison’s prose shifts into a higher register during the sermon, employing mimicry of the sermonic tradition so that the reader experiences the same seductive rhetorical pull that captivates the narrator. The chapter also functions as a parallel to the Battle Royal in Chapter 1—both are elaborately staged spectacles using physical blindness (the blindfold then, Barbee’s sightlessness here) to literalize the novel’s central metaphor of invisibility.