Mad With Power

Extreme abuse of power come when someone has done an extreme effort to gain such authority or simply has had it all their lives and assumes that it is their right to keep that authority and use it at their advantage. This is the rant that Bledsoe goes into in chapter 6 of Invisible Man. There is no doubt that his tone is patronizing through the entire rant and that he had little reason to scold the narrator to the point of putting himself in jeopardy of loosing his entire power. He simply underestimated the guts of the narrator to go up to him and fight back. But the narrator did not know that this was the man that had far more control than he did in just about every single aspect. He could kick him out of the school, and create his own platform to do just about whatever he wanted with him. But every man with power is afraid of loosing it. And when he was jeopardized with loosing it, he decided to take it easy. He went from formal to familiar register but his tone remained patronizing even when slowing down. But he never apologized. It would have been too far of a humiliation.

      It might be a very common thing in this particular part of the south and this particular time era. But there is nothing more ironic than a black man calling another one a nigger. It is an insult to the entire black community to use that word. But this is not Bledsoe showing his superiority but more of a sign of weakness that he is nothing more than a cheap and overpowered black man. 

Another piece of irony is "Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warning and self-justifying." (P.142) He just described power as being everything that he would like it to be instead of what it really is. When a person goes mad with power, there is no stopping that person and there is will cross any barrier to expand. He has demonstrated that though his entire ten minute rant. He may regret it after sending the narrator to New York or it may be another abuse of power and lie to get him out of the way. This is the last piece of evidence that demonstrates Bledsoe really does have the ability to create his own platform and control his own world.