INVISIBLE MAN

INVISIBLE MAN (1952) is widely considered one of the finest examples of American literature. Written by Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) at the outset of the civil rights movement, the popular best-seller won the National Book Award in 1953.

Invisible Man is a complex and richly layered tale in which the pointedly unnamed African American narrator tells both his own story and the story of millions of others like him. The novel traces the narrator's experiences from his humiliating teenage participation in a battle royal for the amusement of white southern businessmen through his engagement in—and, significantly, his withdrawal from—the black culture of Harlem. His constant battle is one of and for identity, and it is a battle the narrator shares with millions of Americans in every time and circumstance.

Ellison's characters offer rich variations of doubling and dichotomy. Bledsoe, president of the college the narrator briefly attends, should enlighten his young black students; instead, he is just as oppressive as the surrounding white southern culture. Jack, the leader of the Brotherhood, professes the desire to express the voice of the masses, yet he cannot allow his prized orator to speak his own mind. Ras, who derides the Brotherhood's moderate tactics as a white-sponsored fraud, ends up isolated, the victim of his own radical push for the unity of all African brothers. The narrator illustrates many dichotomies within and around himself, although they are in fact universal influences: South and North, black and white, coercion and freedom, underground and exposure, darkness and light, silence and voice. The appeal of Ellison's narration lies in the fact that the hopes, disappointments, fears, frustrations, and viewpoints that he expresses resonate as strongly with the experience of any alienated group in the United States today—and those who would alienate them—as they did when Ellison published his only novel.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sundquist, Eric J., ed. Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1995.

Barbara SchwarzWachal

Invisible Man, novel by Ralph Ellison, published in 1952.

The nameless black narrator living in an underground “hole” in New York City, brilliantly lighted by electricity he taps from Monopolated Light and Power, is invisible because people with whom he comes in contact “see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination.” Such vision is illustrated by his reminiscences of the Kafkaesque pilgrimage he has made from his beginnings in the South. As a bright high‐school student he is invited by his town's most important men to deliver an oration to them on the virtues of humility. Before he is allowed to speak he must watch ribald entertainment and is forced to join other “niggers” in a blindfold fistfight. When he finally delivers his speech he mistakenly speaks of “social equality” instead of “social responsibility” and has to apologize abjectly so as to retain his prize of a scholarship to a college for blacks. At the college he finds the head to be a tyrannical hypocrite in his treatment of the students and fawningly humble to the white community. Expelled from the college, he goes to New York and soon falls in with the ruthless Brother Jack, leader of the Communist Brotherhood, more concerned with party politics and an authoritarian platform than with true aid to blacks. He is equally disillusioned by Ras the Exhorter, a West Indian rabble‐rousing street leader, basically a self‐promoter, and the Rev. B.P. Rinehart, “spiritual technologist” and preacher and a petty criminal as well. His experiences are climaxed by a surrealistic view of a Harlem race riot and its arson and looting. From this he retreats to his hideaway hole, reflecting upon the dehumanization visited not only on blacks but on all modern men.