Critical consciousness & the narrator's first Brotherhood speech

 The narrator's first speech for the Brotherhood, while being rather vague and featuring  "dispossession" as a buzz-word a lot, also seemed to get extremely personal towards the end. The narrator was digging deeper into his own thoughts and emotions to tell to the audience instead of just saying whatever he thought the audience wanted to hear - he even brushed off Brother Jack's warning of getting too personal and "ending his usefulness before he's begun" (paraphrased, Ellison 245). It could've been seen as a turning point in the narrator's critical consciousness. Yet, all of the narrator's thoughts on that moment in his speech which seemed to be extremely meaningful and personal showed that the narrator still had a long way to go. Once he's alone again, he thinks "What had I meant by saying that I had become 'more human'?" (Ellison, 354). It is possible that he really did mean the words he spoke, but he doesn't yet seem self-aware enough to be able to parse through the meaning of this very intimate part of his speech. His struggle at this moment is with understanding himself and his own opinions, ideology, and motivation. 

It's even more revealing that right after wondering what he had meant, the narrator skipped straight to thinking "Was it a phrase that I had picked up from some preceding speaker, or a slip of the tongue? For a moment, I thought of my grandfather and quickly dismissed him... Perhaps it was something that Woodridge had said in the literature class back at college" (Ellison 354). It's almost as if the narrator thinks it's impossible that the words were something that came from solely from himself, and instead immediately tries to figure out who he had "hear it from". We can see this idea of the narrator just regurgitating others' ideologies with his speech at the beginning of the book that was literally just Booker T. Washington's speech, and the entirety his time at college where he let it shape his every thought and opinion. Even now that he's supposedly free from those restraints, with a world of opportunity and exploration in front of him through the Brotherhood, he doesn't know how to react when something doesn't come from another person. He immediately shoots to tracking down the origin of his words, as if he isn't capable of making them himself. Or at least, not capable of making anything coherent himself - he mentions that it could have been "a slip of the tongue", as if it were just something unimportant, or a mistake. 

The paragraph that immediately follows all of this (which is also the last paragraph in the chapter) is highly interesting to me in the context of what we've just seen the narrator thinking. He talks about how Norton and Bledsoe had made him "see the possibility of achieving something greater and more important than [he'd] ever dreamed", and how the Brotherhood was an opportunity to "have a part in making the big decisions, of seeing through the mystery of how the country, the world, really operated. For the first time, lying there in the dark, I could glimpse the possibility of being more than a member of a race... I had only to work and learn and survive in order to go to the top" (Ellison 355). The two interpretations of this paragraph that I see is either that the narrator is recognizing his own shortcoming in being able to truly understand himself and the world, and seeing that by working to overcome this and being able to form his own critical thoughts instead of being a follower, he  would be able to be "more than a member of a race". However, I think it could also be read as irony - the narrator is seeing all this potential in the Brotherhood, all this possibility to becoming his own person and achieving something great, while not realizing that he's still just being led by someone else and dismissing all of his own ideas in favor for other peoples. He's just exchanged the Bledsoe/Norton ideals for the Brotherhood's.