Sonnet Paper and Museum Project

I have started thinking about my museum project for Invisible Man, and I am seriously considering doing a food medium, i.e. baking some type of cake, muffins, ect. That would represent the book. I like the idea of doing a baking medium because the book is focuses on the battle between the group and the individual, and a cake or cookie could represent these differences. For example, a bunch of different ingredients comprise a cake/cookie just like many individuals create a society. The difference could help highlight the struggle between individual and society in the novel.

When reading the book, I felt that this struggle encompassed many of the themes throughout the story. For example, many stereotypes demeaned the value of an individual, instead forcing all women or all black people to conform to one group. Thus, entities such as the Brotherhood and the narrator’s school didn’t see individuals, but rather large groups of people. In the end, the narrator’s choice to become invisible and live in a hole is his way of trying to escape such thinking. He wants to celebrate his individuality; however, society doesn’t see individuals so he is invisible.

In creating my project, I might try to contrast the final cake with the many ingredients used to create the cake, presenting both in a relevant and symbolic manner. The cake would be decorated in a manner that would reflect smaller themes in the book related to the demeaning of the individual, and the individual ingredients would be represented in a way that reflects the narrator’s final individualistic thinking. Such a presentation will also present the narrator’s final point that you can’t completely avoid society. In the final pages of the novel, he says that he would like to reenter society. Society isn’t all bad, just as the cake is delicious. However, you cannot create the cake without the ingredients, and the narrator wants to enforce this thinking around Harlem and elsewhere.

This weekend, I also worked on my sonnet paper but am having trouble organizing my ideas. I wrote my rough draft as kind of an idea splurge, just putting on paper everything I was thinking. Now I want to organize these ideas in a logical manner that is analytical and connects to the so-what of the poem.

Some things I noticed about the poem:
I did Shakespeare’s sixtieth sonnet, which appropriately is about time (60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute). I noticed that he uses a lot of dualities. For example, the “Wave” imagery at the beginning of the poem can reference a hand motion that could signal either hello or goodbye. Furthermore, he describes Time as the creator and the destroyer. Finally, he contrasts the infinite nature of time with finite moments in time (final couplet). However, I am not quite sure what these dualities represent or how they connect to the so-what of the poem. I know that time is the couplet tie, and he uses both the finite and infinite reference of time, but to what end, I am not sure. If you have any suggestions on how I should proceed with this paper, please let me know.