It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching-yet always with elements of comedy and irony and burlesque that appear in unexpected places.
Ralph Elllison's Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of modern American Negro life. The world is a tricky place, and no one knows this better than the invisible man, who leaves us with these chilling, provocative words: "And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" -Melanie Rehak From the Inside Flap: None of us can ever be sure of the truth beyond ourselves, and possibly not even there. It's also a book about the human race stumbling down the path to identity, challenged and successful to varying degrees. But Ellison's first novel transcends such a narrow definition. Invisible Man is certainly a book about race in America, and sadly enough, few of the problems it chronicles have disappeared even now.
Here I thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either color or men." And because they were blind they would destroy themselves. Of the Brothers, he eventually discerns: "They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their voices. Once again, he realizes he's been duped into believing what he thought was the truth, when in fact it is only another variation. The narrator becomes a spokesman for a mixed-race band of social activists called "The Brotherhood" and believes he is fighting for equality. What ensues is a search for what truth actually is, which proves to be supremely elusive.
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The college director chastises him: "Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie! What kind of an education are you getting around here?" Mystified, the narrator moves north to New York City, where the truth, at least as he perceives it, is dealt another blow when he learns that his former headmaster's recommendation letters are, in fact, letters of condemnation. "When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed, everything and anything except me." But this is hard-won self-knowledge, earned over the course of many years.Īs the book gets started, the narrator is expelled from his Southern Negro college for inadvertently showing a white trustee the reality of black life in the south, including an incestuous farmer and a rural whorehouse. "I am an invisible man," he says in his prologue. Searching for a context in which to know himself, he exists in a very peculiar state.
A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952, Invisible Man chronicles the travels of its narrator, a young, nameless black man, as he moves through the hellish levels of American intolerance and cultural blindness. This, Ralph Ellison argues convincingly, is a dangerous habit. We rely, in this world, on the visual aspects of humanity as a means of learning who we are.
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