Mary Rambo offers to aid the narrator back to health after he is clearly mistreated at the hospital. Mary represents the biblical Virgin Mary; she is a kind motherly figure. Even though Mary Rambo lives in a corrupted world where blacks are suppressed and deprived of their dignity, she still has the moral of helping those who need it. Mary “never laid eyes on [the narrator] before” (252) but still takes the narrator to her home and allows him to stay overnight. Not even in today’s society citizens will bring feeble people home to nurse them back to health.
Mary’s selflessness extends even farther because she never demanded the narrator for money when the rent was months overdue. She always encourages him to make himself worthy, even when the narrator “lost his sense of direction” (258). Mary helped a “heap of others” (252), and tried to inspire them to “make the changes” (255) as well. She believes the younger generation can help the blacks go higher on society’s social scale. In contrast to Mary, Dr. Bledsoe craves for power and does not care about improving his own race. He deprives the narrator of continuing his education and sends him to New York merely because he sees the narrator as a threat to his power.
The narrator meets these two types of people so he can learn to be kind but not naïve. He notices the corruption in the world, but hopefully, because of Mary, this will not give him a complete loss of purpose.
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I am intrigued by your connection to Invisible Man's Mary and the biblical Virgin Mary. Both women are important in the lives of men who are making a difference in their respective worlds. My favorite character so far may be Mary because she is such a motherly, respected, caring woman. Many of the people who see the narrator stumbling helplessly simply watch and do not intervene, yet Mary takes initiative and decides to help the stranger. The narrator achieves success because of Mary and feels gratitude towards her, just as many people today give thanks for the aid from Virgin Mary.
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