Apples in Invisible Man

After finishing most of Invisible Man this weekend, I realized that I had gained a lot of insight about the novel from the index I kept of certain themes and motifs. A lot of subjects came up on nearly every page- notably, black versus white, darkness and light, and knowledge and ignorance. I made a genuine effort to catalogue the most crucial of those instances, but what really interests me in my index is the terms that surfaced only a few times throughout the novel. I saw apples a few times and also direct references to sex a few more and both seemed to be pertinent and related to one another in my examination of the novel.

In many of our discussions in AP Literature this year, we’ve come across the subject of apples and sexuality. Apples in literature often represent knowledge- perhaps of spirituality or even of sex. They are symbolic of temptation, corruption, or enlightenment- sometimes all three at once. The word “apple” appears in Invisible Man exactly six times. First, on page 11, the woman in the narrator’s dream says in reference to her white master, “I loved him and give him the poison and be withered away like a frost-bit apple. Them boys woulda tore him to pieces…” It is significant that the woman, an uneducated slave, should describe her master and sexual companion in terms of a withering apple upon his death- when he dies, hope for being freed (or obtaining knowledge of freedom and the outside world!) shrivels as well.

When the narrator and Mr. Norton come across Jim Trueblood, they also stumble across apple imagery in page 53, when they find a “hard red apple stamped out of tin” near the man’s porch. The fact that Trueblood has a bright shining symbol of knowledge left like garbage out on his front lawn speaks volumes about the man’s character. He’s ignorant of the fact that he should take responsibility for his disgusting lack of morals and of the white leaders’ motivations for financing him.

One of the last significant mentions of the apple in Invisible Man that can perhaps be most directly linked to sexuality occurs after the narrator is released from the Liberty Paint hospital. The narrator sees a young platinum blond nibbling at a Red Delicious apple on page 250. The event is extremely significant in the novel- for starters, the instance is one of few where the narrator expresses an interest in sex – especially interesting that he’s interested in a white woman when society forbids him to act out such an interest. The woman nibbling on an apple, on knowledge, is like a portent to the narrator that the times are changing and that everyone’s preconceived notions about race and sexuality are about to change- the “platinum” of her hair supports this modernism.

After searching through the book and finding significant mentions of apples where I wouldn’t expect them, I’m definitely going to keep an eye out from now on when reading other works of literature for mentions of apples, because they are almost always significant in some way or another.