Invisible Man

The narrator had choices.





Oh, you want more? That's not enough information for you?... *Sigh* Okay. See, the way I see it, everything that happens to us is the result of a choice. Almost everything. Sometimes, people do things to us, but we have the choice of letting them, stopping them, or running away from them. In the eyes of mortals, our free will is infinite, unlimited. Not so much in the eyes of deities, but that's a different subject for a different time.
"They forced him," you say. "He had no choice but to get in the ring and fight."
Not true. It was simply the best option. The narrator says he has no choice in the matter when really, he just knows that the alternative is that he gets the shit kicked out of him by a bunch of drunk, angry white guys. He <i>chooses</i> the better option. Plus, he was conscious enough to realize that some of the guys were jumping out of the ring, so he could have chosen to do the same. He could have chosen not to go after the money. He could have chosen to lose the battle royale altogether. But he didn't. Because he kept choosing the self-preserving options. He didn't want fifty angry white guys beating him into Jell-O.
All in all, I liked it. Maybe it wasn't about race, but there were certainly some racial aspects of it. Like the illusion of success in the black community. The white guys gave him a scholarship for his talent in speech-writing, but it was to a Negro college. They chose a college for him, they didn't hand him a check and say "Pick any college you like, son. You've earned it." Nope, they said "Go to this black school and be a good boy." It's condescending. They send the smart black kids off to college so they don't cause trouble for the white folk. Then they're free to push around the more uneducated ones. Sad but true.