One of the most important books in American Literature, Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” is a surrealist satirical socio-political horror novel that attempts to examine the American Black Experience via a series of incidents in the life of the narrator, a nameless black man who claims to be invisible, metaphorically speaking. Unlike the invisible man of H.G. Wells’s novel of the same name, whose invisibility is a literal condition brought on by a lab accident, Ellison’s narrator’s invisibility is a condition of his race and of society’s distorted view of race. At the beginning of the novel, we meet him living in a basement apartment, his “hole in the ground” where he spends his time re-examining his life up to this point. The rest of the book is told in flashback, recounting the incidents that led to his becoming invisible.Ellison published “Invisible Man” in 1952 to critical acclaim. Heavily inspired by existentialism, the novel examines issues of racial identity and the social aspect of racism in regards to American society. Ellison wrote his novel in a unique experimental form that is both complex and immensely readable. Each chapter reads like a biblical parable, full of symbolism and deeper meaning. While interpretations may vary from reader to reader, much of Ellison’s allusions stem from real-life experience, and many of the characters are modeled after actual people in his life. It helps to know a little about Ellison’s life before reading “Invisible Man”. At the very least, it’s useful to have some knowledge of where Ellison was coming from and the basis for some of his allusions.****Ellison planned on being a jazz musician. He attended the Tuskegee Institute (now known as Tuskegee University) in Tuskegee, Alabama, the famous black college founded by Booker T. Washington, to study music. In the book, the narrator fondly recalls his underclass days at the unnamed black college he is attending. Everyone on campus reverentially refers to the Founder, also unnamed but clearly based on Washington. Ellison criticizes Washington’s “idealized” view of the Black Experience through the character of Dr. Bledsoe, the college president, who chastises the narrator for a situation in which the narrator, acting as chauffeur for a visiting white patron, accidentally shows the white patron the wrong side of the tracks, where the poor, uneducated, and “uncivilized” black people live---a place in which no decent black person would ever step foot.Clearly, Ellison is critical of the Washingtonian mentality that says that, in order to survive in the white man’s world, a black person must be compliant, polite, and not too “uppity”. True equality is unattainable, according to this worldview, but a black person can still be successful in the white man’s world if they simply act responsible.Nowhere is this more evident than in the book’s most surreal and disturbing scene, the famous “battle royal”. In this scene, the narrator as a young high school graduate is invited, along with other black classmates, to a gathering of prominent white community members. The narrator is under the impression that he is to give a speech, the speech he gave at his school graduation. Instead, he and the other young men are blindfolded and thrown into a boxing ring, where they are to beat each other up. Afterwards, the bloody and battered young men are told to retrieve money scattered on the floor, only to find that the floor is electrified. The young men jump around violently, attempting to gather the money. Humiliation is the point of this exercise, but the greater point also seems to be subservience: do whatever the white man wants, no matter how awful, and you shall be rewarded.Indeed, the narrator is rewarded. He is asked to give his speech, which he does, while the white men continue talking and laughing and making every effort to appear that they aren’t listening, until the narrator comes to his part in the speech where he talks about “social equality”. Suddenly, the white men are quiet. One man says, “Boy, don’t you mean ‘social responsibility’?” The narrator gets the message. He caves and responds that he misspoke.The black scholar is, according to Ellison, a sham. The black college is an attempt to create an educated (enough) workforce of black men for the white man. The narrator has bought into this philosophy.After the incident with the white patron, Dr. Bledsoe sends the narrator to New York City with sealed letters of recommendation and instructions not to open them. It is this part in the book where the narrator has his eyes forcibly opened.****Ellison’s interest in music eventually shifted toward writing, and he left Alabama to go to New York City, where he became friends with influential black writers like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. In the book, the narrator travels to Harlem of the 1930s, but his experience---unlike Ellison’s---is anything but pleasant. When he attempts to find a job, a compassionate white interviewer lets the narrator know what is in Dr. Bledsoe’s letters of recommendation. Apparently, the college president has nothing nice to say about the narrator and instructs the interviewers to give him any menial job available and one that will prevent him from ever coming back to college.Feeling betrayed, the narrator finds a job at a paint-making factory that specializes in white paint. Ironically, this paint is manufactured proudly by an older black man, who lords over his factory with an irrationally territorial fanaticism and paranoia. When he erroneously suspects the narrator of having dealings with the union, the two argue, neglecting a machine that causes an explosion. When the narrator awakens, he is in a hospital attached to the factory, where the white doctors on duty perform nightmarish mind experiments on the narrator, including electro-shock, for no apparent reason.This part is probably the most surreal and open to interpretation, although it seems clear that Ellison is making some pretty vicious commentary about industrialized blacks, those young men who have graduated from the Washingtonian school of thought regarding meritocratic upward mobility. Mr. Brockway, the black man who works in the factory, has a fear and hatred of unionizing. The narrator does not have an opinion one way or the other about unions, but he is not necessarily against them. This is perhaps Ellison’s criticism about the lack of unity among black people to better themselves as a race, as opposed to capitalistic competition in order to better themselves individually.This episode in the book leads to the narrator’s “revelation” period, in which he discovers a positive force within the ideals of Socialism.****In real life, Ellison’s relationship with Socialism began with his mother, who was a proud Socialist Party member. In the book, the narrator falls into his political views when he is recruited by the Brotherhood. Attracted by the idea of true equality between the races, the narrator becomes one of the Brotherhood’s star members, only to gradually become disillusioned and, later, disenfranchised by the group.The ends begin to fray for the narrator when many of the blacks in the community he has recruited into the Brotherhood begin to leave, due in large part to a man called Ras the Exhorter. This outspoken, angry Jamaican-born activist preaches a violent overthrow of the white people, believing that the races can never live in peace with each other, and whites will never truly see blacks as equals. Ras is modelled after Marcus Garvey. Ellison does not agree with the Garveyist worldview, either, painting it as too militant and doing more harm than good within the black community.Yet, Ellison has also become disillusioned with the Socialist movement, which ultimately turns its back on the black community and those black members who have not lived up to expectations.****In the end, the narrator sits in his room, contemplating his life and choices up to that point. He begins to feel the stirrings of hope again at the realization that his invisibility has an up side: it has enabled him to be his own man, with his own thoughts and feelings, rather than a tabula rasa upon which others vicariously attempt to imprint their own thoughts and feelings. He realizes, too, that, while he hasn’t found the answers, he can’t abandon the black community. In the end, the narrator realizes the importance of both social responsibility and the continual search for social equality.“Invisible Man” deserves to be hailed as one of the most important books in American literature. It is the first real intellectual existential novel about the Black Experience, and as someone who has never lived (and never will live) It, it has the significant virtue of making It very real and understandable.
"If social protest is antithetical to art," Ellison stated in an interview with The Paris Review, "what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?" I found the interview stimulating, especially since Ellison's narrator's voice seemed to reach across the pages of this book and coalesce with the myriad of current events. "Perhaps, though, this thing cuts both ways," Ellison continued in the interview, "the Negro novelist draws his blackness too tightly around him when he sits down to write—that’s what the antiprotest critics believe—but perhaps the white reader draws his whiteness around himself when he sits down to read. He doesn’t want to identify himself with Negro characters in terms of our immediate racial and social situation, though on the deeper human level identification can become compelling when the situation is revealed artistically." And here is when things get controversial, when some will stop reading, because to speak of race relations in America is to risk offending. Yet how can you not, when you've just watched someone you love go out for an early morning jog only to head back seconds later, with mounting nervousness, just to grab an ID? Artistic revelation, yes, this is how I would describe this novel. "Though invisible, I am in the great American tradition of tinkers. That makes me kin to Ford, Edison and Franklin. Call me, since I have a theory and a concept, a "thinker-tinker." Only a few protagonists can bind you, hands and feet, to their inner thoughts like this narrator can; only a few chosen writers can combine dramatic dialogue with self-exploratory meanderings and controlled prose that vividly reveals the life of one black man in America. Consider the metaphorical language Fitzgerald dazzles us with in The Great Gatsby; think about the clairvoyance of George Orwell in 1984,how he produced scripted scenes that came to life years later; remember the racial debate in William Styron's Sophie's Choice,recall the language and riveting voice of Toni Morrison's main character in Home,and you will have considered this novel. How can we not discuss race relations when a young boy just bled to death on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, his body left on the cold cement as a spectacle for hours, when even serial killers are fed elegant meals before they're executed in semi-private rooms? How can you not talk about the invisible man who was choked to death on the streets for selling loose cigarettes, even as he screamed, I can't breathe; or how about the invisible young man who was shot to death for strolling in his own neighborhood, wearing a hoodie? I could continue with the list that has been growing since the past year. "Right now in this country, with its many national groups, all the old heroes are being called back to life--Jefferson, Jackson, Pulaski, Garibaldi, Booker T. Washington, Sun Yat-sen, Danny O'Connell, Abraham Lincoln and countless others are being asked to step once again upon the stage of history…Destruction lies ahead unless things are changed. And things must be changed." I get chills when I think that those words were written years ago, and yet they are relevant today.You don't talk about these things around peers-- it's a no-no, like speaking of religion or politics. Instead, when you must censor the confusing and nauseating moments you have once you consider how such tensions affect your life, you turn to books. I reached for this book off my shelf and Ellison's words placed within me a sense of understanding and calm like no other writer could at this moment (this makes me take a moment of silence for non-readers). This book is devastatingly beautiful in its cold-hearted truth and individual perceptions. This narrator grows and develops from a young, black, college boy who has not been around his white counterparts, to a learned young man who slowly understands his invisibility and most importantly, understands how everyone--black and white--contributes to his invisibility. It is simply a story of self-discovery as seen from the perspective of a black character. Both tragic and enlightening, it is rife with imagery, unique cadence, "dialect," and rhythmic expose (and a few choice words that could be off-putting for some). I'm glad I chose it and it chose me. Here beneath the deep indigo sky, here, alive with looping swifts and darting moths, here in the hereness of the night not yet lighted by the moon that looms blood-red behind the chapel like a fallen sun, its radiance shedding not upon the here-dusk of twittering bats, nor on the there-night of cricket and whippoorwill, but focused short-rayed upon our place of convergence; and we drifting forward with rigid motions, limbs stiff and voices now silent, as though on exhibit even in the dark, and the moon a white man's bloodshot eye.
What do You think about Invisible Man (1995)?
A powerful novel; one of the must reads. Written shortly after the Second World War it is the classic study of invisibility; what it means not be be "seen" in society. Set in the US it is an unflinching analysis of racism at all levels of society. The unnamed narrator starts in the South at college and continues in New York. Ellison pours into his writing his frustrations with the attitude of the left in America just after the Second World War. There are some memorable characters, I would like to have seen more of Ras, who was a fascinating and complex character. There is a rich vein of humour in the book, but there is a brutal realism as well. The opening of the book is one of its great strengths as Ellison sets the stall for the whole novel. The narrator's initial hopes are gradually dashed and disillusionment very slowly sets in. He sees the suffering of those around him and the practical effects of racism and discovers he has a voiceand can move people. What to do with that voice? This is where the Brotherhood comes in.The Brotherhood is a left-wing/Marxist organisation commited to radical change in society and Ellison is reflecting his own experiences with the left. The narrator is given a job with the Brotherhood, to assist with their efforts in Harlem. The Brotherhodd have sections which deal with different aspects of their work and the committee dictates policy and practice. The narrator is taken out of poverty and given a new flat, but is bound by policies which he does not always understand. At one point the narrator is taken away from Harlem to work on the issue of women's rights because the committee disapproves of some of his actions. The incendiary climax can clearly be seen coming, but is no less shocking and poignant; the futility of it all is striking. The real villains are the Brotherhood. The racists are, well, racist and behave as you would expect. However the Brotherhood are about equality and change in society and ought to know better, but they turn out to be just as racist and lacking in compassion as the rest.I remember being involved in debates in my youth concerning left wing politics. Whether it was race, gender, sexuality, the environment; everything was secondary to the primacy of how Marx said things should happen in terms of revolution and change; economic issues were always primary. Others issues when it came down to it were irrelevant, a great mistake as Ellison powerfully shows. The Brotherhood use the race issue when it suits them and discard it when it does not without a thought for the people involved.I'd like to say that things are completely different to when this was written; in many ways times have changed, but there are still indicators that old attitudes may be dormant rather than gone. When times are difficult people still vote for those who play on fears and prjudice (the last few days in the UK have shown that); outsiders are still stereotyped. That is what makes this book and Ellison's message so important.
—Paul
Full disclosure: I wrote my master's thesis on Ellison's novel because I thought the first time that I read it that it is one of the most significant pieces of literature from the 20th century. Now that I teach it in my AP English class, I've reread it many times, and I'm more convinced than ever that if you are only going to read one book in your life, it should be this one. The unnamed protagonist re-enacts the diaspora of African-Americans from the South to the North--and the surreal experience of racism, rage, and manipulation rarely expressed with such force and eloquence. Ellison follows tried and true patterns from dramatic ritual to spell out his invisible man's journey from cocksure teenager to furious refugee hiding out in a basement in Harlem. The last lines of the book are haunting and almost hopeful through the despair.
—Kay
This is strongly reminiscent of German Expressionist drama from the early 20th century. It suffers from an inability to actually characterize anyone beyond the protagonist. Every other character is crushed by the need to represent a whole class or demographic. All of the other figures are episodes in his life, his personal development, his realization of society's deep-seated decay and his inexorable (and predictable) movement towards disillusionment. Which is to say that it is a heavy-handed, young, stereotype filled book.Yes, it is a worthy historical object. Yes, it is an interesting foil to other pieces of American literature (which does not have too many books of this variety); but I don't think it deserves great praise if it is judged on its own merits. The prose is nothing special, the dialect isn't handled with particular grace, it has an irritating tendency to state the obvious and to self-interpret and the author actually takes the time to call attention to the fact that he is choosing to rant at you for the last five pages--a total admission of weakness.I am, however, giving it two stars in the "it was okay" sort of fashion. I'm not upset that I read it. I just won't read it again, teach it or reccommend it to anyone.
—Nathaniel
