an invisible shaper

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and John Gardner's Grendel both feature a relationship between manipulator and manipulated. This relationship appears to be detrimental to each position in the novels, the manipulation often involving the obscurity of the truth.

Within Invisible Man, the narrator is given advice early on to "be [his] own father" (Ellison 156), or to make his own decisions, by a "mad" veteran. He is advised to do so after he is found obeying and following the orders of Mr. Norton, a rich trustee of the school he attends. Norton makes assertions that the narrator is a part of his fate and destiny, that the narrator's achievements will be his own achievements. Once realizing this, the veteran describes the narrator as "a mark on the scoreboard of [Norton's] achievement" (Ellison 95); he is also referred to as a "mechanical man" (Ellison 94) as if he is a robot doing Norton's bidding. The narrator is simply something that Norton can show off as if he were a prized possession, or even a son. This relationship between father and son is also mentioned by the veteran, who comments that the narrator is also acting as "a child, or even less--a black amorphous thing" (Ellison 95) that can be manipulated and shaped by Norton. The narrator's inability to understand the vet's word leaves the veteran believing that he fails to "understand the simple facts of life" (Ellison 94) because of Norton's distortion of the truth.

Grendel in Grendel is influenced by the Shaper, a man who maintains the innocence of the Danes by performing songs that speak to his people the "truths" of the world. However, Grendel realizes that his songs only give the people "blissfsul, swinish ignorance" (Gardner 77) as they don't sing of truth but rather warped stories to protest his people. With his eloquence as a harpist, he makes it "all seem true and very fine" (Gardner 43) even to Grendel. Grendel immediately realizes the influence the Shaper holds in shaping the minds of his listeners, believing that he had "changed the world... had transmuted it" (Gardner 43). As Grendel is unable to determine his place in society--made an outcast by all despite his cries for "Mercy! Peace!" (Gardner 51)--he confirms that he "a machine" (Gardner 123), blindly playing into the hands of fate.

The narrator of Ralph Ellison's novel first realizes the influence that others hold over him when he purchases yams from a vendor. Initially he rejected foods that tied him back to his culture, believing his refusal to be an "act of discipline, a sign of the change that was coming over [him]" (Ellison 178). His shame for his Southern background and desire to be accepted by the Northerners affects him with this rejection, though he later discards it as he realizes he's doing "what was expected of [him] instead of what [he himself] had wished to do" (Ellison 266). Despite this realization, he is still manipulated by a "father" figure found in Brother Jack, who tells him that he was "not hired to think" (Ellison 470) but rather to speak what the Brotherhood wanted him to speak. In this case, the narrator is blind to the organization's hold over him, equated with Tod Clifton's Sambo doll with a black thread in the back, which had been invisible to the narrator.

Despite his disdain for "blind mechanism ages old" (Gardner 21), Grendel feels compelled to play into the Shaper's songs and act as "the dark side" (Gardner 51). This is because he is also given an idea from the dragon that the world is meaningless, that "in a billion billion billion years, everything will have come and gone in several times, in various forms" (Garnder 70). This idea that the world will eventually become nothing upsets Grendel as he "cannot believe such monstrous energy of grief can lead to nothing" (Gardner 123). Although he knows that the Shaper's words are simply masks of the truth, he must play into his work as his is the lesser of two evils; at least through the Shaper, Grendel is given a purpose to life.

While the narrator of Invisible Man plays into the hands of his manipulators unknowingly, Grendel is forced to do so in order to keep from going insane with the possibility that the world will soon be nothing. Grendel's internal struggles greatly outweigh those of Ralph Ellison's narrator.