Customer Reviews

Invisible Man

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I read this book years ago. I bought it for my son and I plan on reading it with him. This book shows how some people in society view others as insignificant.

This book is amazing hands down. I love the ideas of invisibilty, blindness, and oppression. However, the seller did not state that they wrote into the book and the prolog was written on. Also some other pages had foot notes inserted by the previous reader. All in all, after looking over those minor problems, good book.

I'm a white guy who just finished reading "Invisible Man." This is a classic work of 20th century American literature. The narrator of the novel, told in first person, is never named. What a concept! After all, he's invisible, right? This young black man starts out in the South and then moves to New York City, circa the 1940s (even the time frame in this book is hard to figure.) The leading character constantly gets into trouble for doing the right thing or just being honest. At times, his adventures seem the stuff of bad acid trips or journeys through an "Alice in Wonderland" kind of world populated by people spouting intellectual sophistry if not outright b.s. He joins "the Brotherhood" whose members are white and black, its politics cynical and pragmatic. This group pays him money to give speeches and be an administrator. But he eventually discovers their true motives. The narrator's only friends are the married white women who throw themselves at him for purposes of stud, his only bad karma in the book. Yet he's certainly a likeable, introspective fellow, a Kafka-esque victim of society.

The poisonous assaults on the character of Barack Obama - by Glenn Beck, Dinesh D'Souza, and other opportunistic pundits of the Ranting Righteous - have reconfirmed many of the disturbing insights into American racism of Ralph's Ellison's classic 1952 novel "Invisible Man." Barack Obama is truly `invisible' to his political enemies, who consistently ignore both his words and his actions in favor of their own projections of him as a radical, rageful, revengeful racist, simultaneously a Communist and an Islamicist. But, as the `narrator' of Ellison's novel learned to his sorrow, Obama is none too clearly `visible' to his supporters either. The most clear-sighted examination of Obama's personhood and politics that I've read is historian James Kloppenberg's "Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Tradition." Using both biographical material and Obama's own writings, from his earliest articles in the Harvard Law Journal through his own full-length books to his campaing speeches and presidential addresses, Professor Kloppenberg convincingly locates Obama in the tradition of American pragmatism and of consensus achieved by dialogue, a thinker not attracted to ideology of either the left or the right, a socially liberal moderate whose ideas reflect his education in American history and philosophy. The strongest influences on Obama's thinking come, according to Kloppenberg, from philospher John Rawls, hsitorian Gordon Wood, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and legal scholar Lawrence Tribe. As a result, Obama's political stances are remarkably close to what the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas would approve, above all a commitment to democratic discourse and a discomfort with any sort of absolutism or `foundationalism.'

However, Kloppenberg also traces the special influence of Obama's experience as a `man of color' in American society, and examines the impact that African-American writers and leaders have had on the country's first non-white president. In particular, Kloppenberg suggests that Obama's early encounter with the novel "Invisible Man" has made a lasting impression:
""Obama's debts to Ellison run particularly deep. Many borrowed images from Invisible Man ... pop up in passages in Dreams From My Father. Yet Obama acknowledges that no matter how attractive the pose of anger and alienation seemed to him as a young man, it was a poor fit, both because of his even-tempered personality and because of his very different circumstances. For all these reasons Invisible Man, with its deperate refusal to surrender, its determination to affirm the principle [of equality in diversity, of `e pluribus unum], and its resolutely indeterminate ending, left a particularly clear imprint on Obama's sensibility.""

"Very different circumstances" indeed! Invisible Man was published in 1952! Before the Supreme Court decisions that struck down `separate but equal' apartheid in the USA. Before MLK and Malcolm X, before the civil rights campaigns of the `50s and 60s but also before Black Power and the Black Panthers. Before the elections of the first Black governors, mayors, and congresspeople since the aborted Reconstruction after the War to Extend Slavery. Before an African-American without an Uncle Remus drawl could speak up without causing consternation. Before a TV ad could possibly have shown a sophisticated, personable African-American socializing with a similar European-American. And quite a few years before Barack Obama was born!

I had to re-read this book therefore. I had to reappraise it, in light of all those incomplete transformations of American society, in light of the election of Obama and the frenzied backlash it has generated.

And I could write a book about this book. In fact, many books have already been written about this book. It's a challenging, complex piece of literature. It probably defies any coherent exegesis; I know I wouldn't try. On the most obvious level, it's the tale of the `education' of a highly intelligent young black man from the impoverished rural South, who travels to New York and becomes the dupe of a Utopian movement called The Brotherhood, whose efforts to advance himself are repeatedly thwarted by a combination of accidental circumstances and the malevolent self-interests of both whites and blacks. It's a sprawling story, many chapters of which are obviously not intended to be flatly realistic. I haven't encountered any previous criticism of it that says so, but to me Invisible Man fits perfectly into the venerable genre of the Picaresque, that is, of the innocent youth who sets out to seek his fortune and who falls repeatedly into the company of rogues and fools. A one-page outline of the plot of Invisible Man would be also parallel to that of Lazarillo de Tormes, the 16th C Spanish novel often considered the first picaresque. In other words, Invisible Man can't be and shouldn't be read just as an African-American book; it belongs in the canon of European literature, written in a European language - English - to be comprehended in the context of European socio-political traditions. To deny Ralph Ellison's European intellectual roots, entwined with his historical American identity as the grandchild of slaves, is to perpetuate the "invisibility" his fictional character suffers. The extension is obvious: Barack Obama, with his European-American mother and maternal clan, is as fully European as any other American, even while he is also ineffably a `black' American in experience! It's a little like the theological mystery of the Incarnation of Jesus -- fully human yet fully divine.

This `invisibility' of Ellison's is not something unique to African-Americans, I would argue. Lazarillo de Tormes was also `invisible' to those around him by reason of his illegitimate birth and caste. Koreans have been `invisible' in Japan, Samii in Sweden, Kurds in Turkey. `Gay' people may find themselves more `invisible' outside the closet than they were inside. James Baldwin wrote, in effect, of his double invisibility as a gay black man. Ellison's meaning of `invisibility' is subtle. The `invisible man' is not unseen. Rather, he's seen only as the beholder wants to see him, without any interest in perceiving him as he truly is. And that, dear readers, is the fate that President Barack Obama is confronting in the USA today.

E pluribus unum! Where have you seen those words? They're on the Great Seal of the USA, and thus on the money. The Latin words mean "from many, one." This was the de facto motto of the nation throughout its history until 1956, when Congress adopted "In God We Trust" as the official motto. `Originalists" -- reactionaries who insist that the original intent of the writers of the Constitution was this or that, never to be renewed -- declare that "e pluribus unum" refers to the limited unity conceded to the federal government by the original thirteen soveriegn states, and only to that. Most Americans have had the habit of interpreting the motto more philosophically, recognizing that American culture is the result of the Melting Pot, the intermingling of different ethnic stocks, different religious and economic backgrounds, different races. If the Invisible Man in Ralph Ellison's novel was left hoping, as he says on the last page of the book, that "even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play," then I'd argue that his role is to sustain `the many' that constitute `the one.' And that, I would say, is what Barack Obama aspires to, in which case reading this novel may indeed offer a template of his character.

[Of the two editions listed first on amazon, this is the one I chose, largely because of the stronger binding. But it has a worthwhile introduction by Charles Johnson.]