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Invisible Man

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This is one of those books I was assigned in English class that I didn't want to read. How wrong I was--this makes my short list of the greatest stories ever written. Ellison creates a vivid and shocking picture of America and society's subversion of individual identity in search of something larger. He said soon after the book was published that "Invisible Man" was not just about the black experience in America, it was an account of every person's "invisibility" in a world that tells us how to think of each other. The African-American protagonist is merely a vehicle for Ellison's much broader social commentary. Complex, heart-wrenching, deeply moving and of course beautifully written, this book is a must-read for anyone who thinks they have a grip on the American experience.

When I first read Ralph Ellison's remarkable Invisible Man I was in college. Having grown up middle class midwestern white, it seemed at the time to be a marvelous piece of work that plunged me into the nightmarishly crushing world of racism from the black perspective. It opened my eyes to racism in a way that I could never have possibly percieved from the perspective of my own limited experience.

Thirty years later I pulled this book from the shelf and reread it on a whim. A number of things struck me on this reading that never occurred to me from my earlier limited youthful perspective.

First of all, Invisible Man is timeless and I find it hard to believe that it was written nearly fifty years ago. This book is about far more than racism, it is about loss of innocence and rape of the soul. It is about exploitation, manipulation, and the gross hypocrisy that exists in our society.

It is a work of great literary merit. Ellison displays verbal virtuosity of great breadth with beautiful and lyric eloquence. It is at times so dark and overbearingly heavy that a sensitive or less serious reader might cry out for relief. It is so relentless in plunging from one nightmarish episode to the next that one can reasonably say that it is often over the top, and yet any fair-minded reader can easily forgive the excesses of Ellison's vision for the importance of the message that it brings home.

Any reader, be he or she black, white, yellow or brown, who must make a way in this world--any reader who attempts to rise from the consciousness of the unprivelidged child or who is a seeker in life, should read Invisible Man as a cautionary tale as well as a great work of art. Please read this book if you have the courage and honesty to see the world through the eyes of the victim. This book has helped me to see those who had often in the past been invisible to me and I thank Ralph Ellison for making it possible.

Ellison, Baldwin and Wright formed the triumvirate of great African American male novelists of the past 200 years. Of the three, Ellison may well prove to be the most timeless. While Native Son, Black Boy and Go Tell it on a Mountain are powerful works, they don't quite measure up to Invisible Man, in terms of sheer literary genius.

While Ellison wears his influences on his sleeve (Dostoevsky, symbolist poets, existentialist writers, etc.[he even borrows his title from HG Wells]), his writing never suffers or sinks beneath the weight of literary associations. His was a unique voice and vision.

Like Dostoevsky's Underground Man, Ellison's narrator has essentially beat a retreat from the world. He holes up in a subterranean room, where he reflects on the the injustices society has dealt him. Dostoevsky's narrator purposely bumps into people on the Nevsky Prospect in order to certify that he is visible and just as important as the next man. Ellison's Invisible Man beats and almost kills a white man he confronts on an empty street, also in order to rationalize his own existence.

Both the underground man and the invisible man are filled with self loathing. Yet, in Ellison's work, the narrator does achieve a sort of spiritual progress and affirmative self-knowledge. He goes from being a pathetically exploited non-being that must acceed to the whims and wishes of the white opressor (the often anthologized battle royal scene at the beginning of the book), to a point near the conclusion of the book in which he can state he is free to pursue "infinite possibilities."

Irving Howe, in an overall favorable review of the novel, took Ellison to task on several fronts. He complained that the section wherein the narrator falls in with "The Brotherhood" portrays the communist party in an an unrealistic vein. He was also troubled by Ellison's narrative design: "Because the book is written in the first person singular, Ellison cannot establish ironic distance between his hero and himself, or between the matured "I" telling the story and the "I" who is its victim. And because the experience is so apocalyptic and magnified, it absorbs and then dissolves the hero; every minor character comes through brilliantly, but the seeing "I" is seldom seen." Though I generally have a high opinion of Irving Howe's criticism, I think he's arriving at a conclusion here which entirely deflates his own remarks. Yes, the "I" in Invisible Man is harder to see than the other characters, but that is part of the author's construct. It's the very point he makes over and over throughout the novel. How better to portray an "invisible man?"

If you've never read this important work, try reading the first 40 pages that are on display here at .... It includes the famous battle royal sequence, which is one of the best hook chapters in all of literature. It should be enough to induce you to read the rest of the novel. You are in for an unforgettable read.

When I was 12 years old, my father brought home a trunk full of used books from a thrift store. In it was every book imaginable by the leading lights of the African-American literary pantheon. Baldwin, Hughes, Hurston, Wright, Fanon, Brown and of course the weightiest of the tomes at 600-plus pages, Ellison's Invisible Man. I read through all the slimmer volumes and never got around to Ellison until I was in college. Even after hearing all the hype about it for years on end, I was still floored by the book. It was the kind of book you backtrack while reading, retracing chapters you just read to see if the initial impact of the words was really that forceful. I empathized with the book and it's protagonist because having just gone through my early adolescence and teens I sensed his feeling of longing...and need for belonging. Nearing the end of the book, I slowed my pace, afraid of what I would find. After finishing it for many days (weeks, months...) afterward the book haunted my quiet times. It haunted me whenever I thought about it for years afterward. Thus, having just bought the "new" Ellison, "Juneteenth" I also bought the new commemorative "Invisible Man" and decided to read it again first. It was more powerful than before. It's tale of a search for identity in a land where your identity is denied rings even truer in this time of assimilation/balkanization. We live in a time where color-blindness (one form of invisibility) is the alleged goal while denial of recognition and privelege (the more prevalent form of invisibility) is still the unfortunate norm. Beyond being a book of the 50's and the civil rights era, it's even more important as a book for the move to a new millennium...where the lines demarking identity simultaneously harden and blur. And as to the reviewer who was puzzled about the lead character's display of leadership skills and potential while never seeming to live up to it, there is no need for puzzlement. From the teacher busted for drug-dealing, to the born-again pro-footballer busted on Super Bowl eve for solicitation to the present resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, this paradox is perhaps more the norm than we are willing to admit.

"Stephen's task, like ours, was not in creating the uncreated aspects of his race, but of discovering the undiscovered features of his face. Our task is in making ourselves individuals. The conscience of a race is the conscience of its individuals who see, evaluate, record... we create the race by creating ourselves, and to our astonishment we would have created something far more important: we would have created a culture. Why waste time creating a conscience for something that does not exist? For you see, blood and skin do not think!"

Ralph Ellison, INVISIBLE MAN

This book is a treasure. This book is filled with all the elements of masterful storytelling, mythic-level subtext and spellbinding events, psychological depth, multi-dimensional characters and characterizations... it will be patently impossible for you to put it down once you have picked it up. I somehow found a way to avoid this book in high school and college- partly, I'm sure, because it became so fashionable to have a timely opinion on its social relevance that it made not having read it seem subhuman, while simultaneously making the act of reading it seem like an inhumanly boring chore. Thank God the spirit of excellence and truth kept calling me to this book. This one book does for the human soul what the authors of most of the last ten plus years of self-help books, sociological tomes, racial dialogues and popular novels COMBINED have both endeavored to do and practically proclaim could not actually be done in print. I came away from this book feeling rejuvenated, stunned, inspired, engaged, taught, challenged, exhilarated, simultaneously filled with both hope and despair- and never at any time did I stop feeling entertained. I not only felt what the character went through, but the sick side of humanity and how it fought the good in every human being he came across, in an insane, insane world that renders human beings, "invisible".

Ralph Ellison was from the school of writers who endeavored not just to write good, timely books but epic myth/epistles of the human condition wrapped up in the pains, sicknesses and triumphs of the present day experience. He didn't try to write a Black book; he tried to write a human book, about the spirit IN a Black man. He did it. He achieved it. He wrote THE book with this, and made our world that much better.

You will enjoy this book immensely.

Joe Morton does a superb job of reading this moving book. I was outraged to find that the final chapter and epilogue (42 pages in the edition I have) were missing. Random House markets this as unabridged. Where is their quality control? How would a listener ever know this was incomplete without having a print copy of the book? I feel cheated and frustrated. This an important book and deserves to be recorded in full and distributed without false claims. Had it been complete, I would have rated it 5 stars.

On several occasions after the publication of his masterpiece, Ralph Ellison acknowledged James Joyce's influence, especially the parallels with "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." Each book traces the development of the consciousness of its lead character, and the style of each novel, as Ellison admitted, moves from naturalism to expressionism to surrealism--although, one might argue, the opening scene of "Invisible Man" hardly resembles anything in the tradition of American naturalism: a grisly boxing match between black men vying for survival as entertainment for a rabid crowd of white patrons. At the end of this "battle royal", the protagonist wins a chance to speak to the audience and receives a promised scholarship to college.

Yet Ellison has most certainly not rewritten Joyce's Ulyssean vision. Instead he has turned Joyce, and the world, on its head; the unnamed lead character, through a series of epiphanies, realizes that society--and his place in it--is never what it seems or claims to be. We watch Ellison's hero evolve, as he learns that participation in white American society doesn't mean that he needs to deny his racial background and folk (read: democratic) traditions The result is an altogether new work, whose comic, satiric, tragic, and even bitter tone describes a world in which up is down and the North is like the South.

The uniqueness of Ellison's work is multiplied by unreal (and seemingly unrealistic) situations. The boxing match is the first of a series of bizarre misadventures; once in college, the "invisible man" serves as chauffeur to an elderly white patron. Like moths to a flame, this odd couple end up exploring the underbelly of the local black community, from a sharecropper's farm to a local brothel. This unintentionally rebellious act results in his expulsion from college; he moves to New York, ultimately finding a role as an organizer for the Communist Party, yet initially unaware that he is nothing more than a trophy. In one of the most angrily ironic scenes of the book, the leaders who have chosen him largely because he is black denounce him for speaking up for "the political consciousness of Harlem" and accuse him of "riding 'race' again." For these political leaders, "such crowds are only our raw materials, one of the raw materials to be shaped to our program."

The concluding scenes take place during the 1943 Harlem riots, where the invisible man finds himself torn between the black nationalism of Ras the Exhorter (modeled after Marcus Garvey) and a mysterious, unseen underworld zootsuiter/minister named Rinehart, who steps "outside the narrow borders of what men call reality" and "into chaos or imagination."

While the ambiguity of these episodes is intensified by the bleakness of Ellison's vision, "Invisible Man" is, at its heart, darkly funny. And Ellison offers no clear answers. In one memorable scene, the lead character enters a diner, asks for the breakfast special, and is offered "pork chops, grits, one egg, hot biscuits, and coffee." Angry at being pegged for a stereotypical Southern black man ("I would have sworn you were a pork chop man," responds the waiter), he orders orange juice, toast, and coffee. As he leaves, however, he notices the counterman serving a "plate of pork chops and grits to a man with a pale blond mustache." Had he seen racism where there was none? Who, indeed, is "a pork chop man"? Was he too quick to deny his ethnic heritage? Had ethnic food, like the jazz and blues that pervade the novel, so saturated white culture that the some of the boundaries were blurring? Ellison leaves these questions unanswered, choosing instead to underscore what it means to be black in America.

Ralph Ellison's THE INVISIBLE MAN is justly celebrated as one of the outstanding American novels of the twentieth century. Though not lacking in universal themes, it truly is a novel rooted in the American experience, a book that explores many of the complexities of race relations in the United States. The book ends by refusing to offer an facile answers or to identify any simple villains. The novel's many villains number as many African Americans as whites, and no true heroes of either race. The sense at the end is that where race relations are concerned, we in America are getting it wrong from beginning to end regardless of our race. Moreover, all political persuasions also seem to be guilty of getting it wrong.

Structurally, THE INVISIBLE MAN owes a great deal to that genre of the English novel that deals with the coming of age of a youthful hero. Indeed, this novel could be profitably be compared to TOM JONES, only without the philosophical sidetracking one finds in that novel and set in the United States with a black hero. Like Tom Jones, the narrator of THE INVISIBLE MAN is thrown by fate from one bizarre experience to another, never being an actor in his own story, but merely a reactor. The narrator does not seize his own fate, but allows himself to be passively shifted about. His story is largely told through stringing together a number of bizarre incidents: a surreal Battle Royal in which a group of young blacks are blindfolded and forced to fight one another for the amusement of a group of whites, who later listen to the battered narrator present a speech that he hopes will win him a scholarship to college. At college he serves as driver for one of the school's white benefactors, but instead of it being an occasion for furthering his career, the day degenerates despite his best intentions into a pure nightmare, which results in his expulsion from school. He travels to New York to seek work, but the only thing he gets from his one day of working in a paint factory is a concussion and short term disability payments. Finally--and this embraces most of the last half of the novel--our hero inadvertently becomes a political speaker for the Communist party (an experience that reflects Ellison's own experience as a political writer for the Communists in the 1930s, though in the novel he refers to them only as The Brotherhood). His work as a Communist organizer is contrasted with an African Black Nationalist agitator named Ras, who in the tradition of Marcus Garvey believes in the separation of the races. What links all these adventures together is that throughout the Narrator is never affirmed or perceived for who he is in himself. All without exception focus on him as a mere member of his race, never on him as an individual. Indeed, while the Communists are largely lacking in the racism he finds elsewhere, their interest in him largely lies in the use to which he can be put. They are, in fact, not interested in individuals at all, and even if they are hostile towards class rather than race, they are equally as hostile towards the individual.

The novel is profoundly political. Ellison is equally disenchanted with those who feel that the goal for blacks is to educate them so that they can gradually become more and more accepted in a white-dominated society, with the Communists who want to eliminate the individual for the sake of the group (indeed, who are willing to sacrifice individuals and even groups of individuals for the sake of furthering the purposes of history), and those who call for a radical withdrawal of blacks from all social intercourse with whites. Instead, he argues at the end of the novel for the primacy of the individual against race, history, or the group. In the end, he expresses the desire to be viewed as himself, apart from whatever categories can be used to define him.

The tone of the book is comic without being truly funny. There is a surreality about most of the sections of the book. Given Ellison's political background in Communism, this is of profound significance. For the Communists, all legitimate fiction had to be starkly realistic. There is very little realism in THE INVISIBLE MAN. Much of the novel is comically nightmarish. In fact, while looking backward the novel reminded me of novels like TOM JONES, looking forward it reminded me of CATCH-22. I do not know if Joseph Heller was influenced by this book, but I would be very surprised if he was not. Much as that novel blends the comic and the tragic (though it is far funnier than Ellison's book, or indeed more than just about any other novel), so did Ellison's. In fact, it is hard to find models for Ellison's book, unless one points to TOM JONES as I have, or perhaps in a vague way to the novels of James Joyce. Indeed, it is hard to realize what a wildly original novel THE INVISIBLE MAN is, if only because he pioneered a narrative style that became commonplace later. Another thing to note about his anti-realism style is his characters. For the most part, Ellison's do not resemble people you would meet in real life. Many are intentional caricatures, many grotesques in the tradition of Charles Dickens. All are intended to emphasize the unreality and nightmarish quality of the narrator's life.

I truly love this novel. It is one of the few important "African American" novels that is more important for its literary qualities than for its role as a racial novel. Ellison makes some amazing and brilliant innovations on the traditional English novel. This is often said to be the finest novel ever written by an African American, but that really is damning it with faint praise. It is almost a way of making it The Invisible Novel. This novel's greatness does not lie in having been written by a black writer, but in being a magnificently marvelous novel on purely literary grounds. My only regret is that Ellison largely turned his back on fiction after publishing THE INVISIBLE MAN. He was also an absolutely brilliant essayist and jazz critic (his formal education was largely in music theory and he early on aspired to being a jazz musician), but I wish he had not so completely abandoned fiction.

Oh my gosh. If you haven't read this book, you are in for an unforgettable experience. What do we have here? The title "Invisible Man" suggests that we have a book about how African Americans are invisible and deserve greater visibility. So its content would chronical a variety of instances where blacks are invisible. This novel does this. Ellison said himself that he wanted to create a war novel, but the "voice of invisibility" prevented him from doing so. Not so fast, though. The first 300 pages deviate from this concept. I think it might be arguing that blacks are OVER-visible with situations of incest, prostitution, and a riot. Then again, this over-visibility might be due to the invisibility mentioned above. Nevermind. :) The prologue seems to universalize suffering as it despecifies the oppression of blacks. It contains elements of instability and indeterminacy. Ellison conveys his blackness in as white a way as possible. He strays from his African roots as he makes references to oppression in Spain and Germany. Even when he has the opportunity to say something expected - the naked black woman being abused by white slave owners - Ellison makes the girl "the color of ivory." What in the world is going on here??? Ellison is trying to get us to pay attention to his composition, not the suffering of a black man trumatized by contemporary experience. Why? Because the only thing that matters is what the Invisible Man learns throughout the novel. Ellison does not give us a poor black boy who grows up without anything being given to him and is humiliated in white society. No. He gives us a black boy who is at college during the period of Jim Crow. This is one of the highest positions a black person could be in during this time! The Invisible Man is as brilliant, ambitious, and conforming as could be possibly imagined. Given all this information - NOW he fails. And boy, does he ever fail... At the beginning of the novel, the Invisible Man's grandfather gives him a speech before he passes away, telling him not to succeed. And that is precisely what the Invisible Man learns at the end of the novel: success is a trap. He begins to learn this lesson around page 400. Yes, Bledsoe succeeds, but only by being willing to hold onto what he has earned, even if he has to see "every negro hanging from a tree." I truly love this book. The book itself is a hymn to ambivalence - ambivalence to the whites who have oppressed the blacks. It is this that the uniqueness of the African American experience has given to Ellison.

This book is 19th on the Modern Library's best 100 novels of the 1900s. As a classic, much has been made of its importance as a study of racial identity in the 1930s. The narrator is a young black man. He is expelled from a southern university in the beginning of the novel when he is assigned the task of chauffeuring a visiting benefactor, a white man, to a school function. The benefactor asks to go for a drive, and the narrator gives him a tour of the rural south that is a little too scenic, one might say.

Thus expelled, the narrator heads to Harlem to seek work and a real-life education. There he becomes a member of The Brotherhood, a mixed-race organization that seems progressive at first. But as the narrator discovers time and again, it's more hype than enthusiasm to actually change the status quo. And despite the repeated offering of help from others, the narrator can only depend on himself. Because, as he realizes, to them he exists only in terms of his ability to help them and forward their cause. To them he is not a person. To them he is an invisible man.

THE INVISIBLE MAN is a book about the politics of racial identity, but framed in the context of the greater philosophical question of identity itself. The narrator, who conspicuously is never named, encounters time and time again the paradoxes of identity. Perceptions, deception, propaganda. The way an action can change a person's image in a community forever. The way a group can push for social change in principle but fail to back that in action (reality). And for the narrator, the paradox of learning more and more but having less and less a personal identity.

This is a book of questions more than it is answers. Insightful social commentary that is as relevant today as it was when it was written.