Invisible Man (1952). Summary and Description

Invisible Man is narrated by the anonymous title character (whose name is never revealed), who describes his disillusioning experiences as a black youth growing up in the racist South and then his further disillusionment when he attends an allblack southern college (obviously modeled on the Tuskegee Institute). After being expelled from the college because he inadvertently let one of its rich white northern trustees see too much of the seamier side of local life, the narrator heads to New York City, where he works briefly in a paint factory before becoming involved with a radical political organization known as the Brotherhood. Although he rises to a position of leadership in that group, by the end of the novel he has become disillusioned with the regimentation and hypocrisy its members exhibit. As the narrator’s story concludes, he is living in isolation, determined to lead a more independent and genuinely authentic existence.

Ellison’s novel is widely regarded as one of the most important works of full-length fiction by any African-American writer, and indeed the book is often seen as one of the most significant novels written by any American in the half-century following World War II. The book is often interpreted as a coming-of-age story or novel of development (a bildungsroman), in which the main character must undergo a series of tests, trials, rites of passage, and repeated disillusionments before reaching a more mature, more skeptical, and more autonomous way of thinking. At the end of the book, the narrator (whom critics sometimes call “Invisible Man” or even simply “Invisible”) is living alone, unknown, and rent-free “in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century” (Invisible 5).

Obviously his anonymous existence in the basement of a building reserved for whites is symbolic, and indeed the novel is full of symbolism, allegory, allusions, and suggestive imagery. The story, therefore, is not simply the tale of a single man but a representative narrative in which Ellison comments not only on the conditions of all American blacks but indeed on the human condition itself. The novel explores a wide variety of themes, topics, and motifs, and it is partly because of its exploration of these themes that it immediately attracted immense attention—attention that has only grown with the passage of years and decades.

Commentators have called attention to many concepts and ideas that are crucial to Ellison’s novel. On the one hand (for instance), the book involves a literal geographical journey from the South to the North, but it also involves a far more important psychological journey in which the narrator grows from adolescence to manhood and from immature naivete to mature skepticism and self-reliance. By the end of the book he is not only older but wiser, and although his wisdom has been born of a series of painful dis- illusionments and betrayals, he finally finds himself poised for authentic growth (although Ellison leaves his future unclear and even raises the possibility that the narrator may not entirely have overcome his external or even his internal limitations).

The novel reflects the influence of the existential philosophy that was especially prominent during the mid-20th century and exemplified in the works of the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher and fiction writer Albert Camus, and the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. Existentialists believed that human life exhibits no fundamental order, purpose, or significance and that existence therefore often seems meaningless and absurd. However, they also believed that each individual person has not only the opportunity but also the obligation to choose his or her own meaning—to live a life that is “authentic” in the sense that each act, and indeed one’s entire existence, is the result of free choice.

Ellison’s narrator undergoes a kind of existential baptism by fire: He tries to live according to a series of conventional, stereotyped roles that have essentially been imposed upon him by society. After each of those roles fails or disappoints him, he eventually learns that he must free himself from social dictates, make his own choices, and live his own life. At the end of the book he seems ready to do exactly that: He has recognized his own individual complexity and seems prepared to live an authentic life that will not involve self-betrayal.

Ellison’s novel, then, is not simply “about” the problems of being black in a racist society (although it is certainly in part about that); it is also “about” the problem of being true to oneself in any society. Ellison did not want to write merely a “protest novel”; instead, he wanted to create a work that would confront some of the most basic and elemental dilemmas faced by all human beings, but especially by blacks, whose lives (he thought) particularly symbolized the challenges all people must confront.

These challenges included constrictions placed on individuality (especially by racism); the limitations caused by narrow ways of thinking and the restrictions imposed by prescribed social roles; the risks of reacting to narrow thinking with equally narrow responses; the problems caused by failing to see clearly, whether that lack of vision involves perceptions of others, perceptions of oneself, or perceptions of society at large; and the need of all human beings to grow in knowledge and especially in self-understanding.

The novel’s title character is a symbol of the special alienation suffered by blacks in American society, but he is also a symbol of the loneliness and frustration that lie at the core of any inauthentic existence. It is partly because Ellison managed to combine a compelling narrative of black experiences with a broader concern with “the human condition” that his book was so positively embraced by black and white readers alike. Ellison was praised for exploring the inner dimensions of his main character rather than treating him simply as sociological data; the book is a philosophical novel, not merely a piece of journalism that reports superficial facts.

However, just as readers have found Ellison’s book compelling because of the themes it explores, so they have also been intrigued by its style, structure, tones, and techniques. The book has been compared to traditional slave narratives because it traces one person’s movement not only from the South to the North but also from bondage to a kind of (limited and potential) freedom. At the same time, however, the novel has also been compared to such classics of Western literature as The Odyssey (since both involve lengthy journeys), The Divine Comedy (since both involve descents into a bewildering world of darkness and confusion), and Moby-Dick (since both are epic in size and scope and deal with an anonymous protagonist’s growth to maturity by way of disillusionment).

In its focus on a corrupt, chaotic, and decaying culture, as well as in its stylistic diversity, use of symbolism, and emphasis on allusions, the book was obviously influenced by T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (one of Ellison’s favorite texts), and in its combination of realism and surrealism it shows Ellison’s reading of such modern authors as Kafka, Joyce, Faulkner, and especially Richard Wright, who composed the novella “The Man Who Lived Underground.” In addition to displaying the breadth and depth of Ellison’s reading, the novel reveals his familiarity with black folk culture, rural dialect, urban street lingo, and the richness of the American oral tradition, both black and white. Mark Twain, after all, was another of Ellison’s favorite writers, as was Ernest Heming- way—influences reflected in the humor of some parts of the novel and in the spare directness of other sections.

Ellison blends straight “reporting” with dreamlike montages full of fantasies and fears; he recreates convincing dialect and invents credible dialogue at the same time that he employs resonant imagery, pervasive symbolism, and widespread allegorical phrasing. Thus Mr. Norton, the rich white trustee of the black college, is from the North; Homer Barbee, an old black man who gives a speech at the college, is blind, as is his namesake, the Greek poet Homer; a character named Jack is both literally and symbolically oneeyed; a nurturing woman named Mary is an obvious maternal figure; a major character who dies tragically is named Tod (the German word for “death”); and the list goes on and on. Likewise, important motifs recur throughout the book.

Thus, chaos takes place in the famous “battle royal” segment early in the novel, but it also appears when the narrator visits a brothel while in college and in a riot near the end of the book. The narrator is shocked with electricity during the “battle royal,” and the same thing happens again (although to a worse degree) when he is hospitalized after moving north. The narrator is betrayed by the president of the southern college, but he is also betrayed by the leader of the northern Brotherhood. Ellison, in short, created a book that is very carefully designed in every way. It reflects a modernist style of writing that was becoming increasingly prominent at the time of this novel’s composition—a “mixed” style that went beyond naturalistic reporting and tried to transcend hard-boiled plainness by emphasizing symbolism and allegory.

It is not a coincidence that Ellison’s book appeared at almost the same moment as Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea—a book that is also full of resonant imagery, evocative symbols, emblematic actions, and icono- graphic characters. Hemingway’s novel, however, was short and relatively simple; Ellison was painting on an epic scale. Invisible Man is his effort to write a book with the same kind of cultural dimensions and intellectual depth as Moby-Dick.

Many commentators felt at the time—and have continued to feel—that Ellison largely succeeded in his attempts to write a (if not the) great American novel. Admirers have praised the book for its vivid and complex characters, its wide stylistic range, its effective use of irony, its sometimes gripping narrative, its often surrealistic episodes, its inventiveness, its skillful use of symbols and imagery, its frequently nightmarish qualities, its detailed observations of life in Harlem and in the Deep South, and its expert recreation not only of elaborate verbal “set pieces” (such as the several lengthy speeches) but also of the rhythms and diction of day-to-day conversation. Nevertheless, despite the praise heaped on all these aspects of Ellison’s novel, the book has also attracted a good deal of censure.

Some critics, for instance, have attacked the book for indulging too often in melodrama, for using phrasing that is overblown in some cases and dull in others, for relying too much on exposition (or explanation) and too little on drama, for being heavy-handed in its use of symbols, and for failing to provide convincingly detailed depictions of its characters, including even the protagonist. Some of the characters have been seen as too simplistic or one-dimensional, and the novel has struck some readers as being too abstract, allegorical, intellectual, and even pretentious for its own good. Politically oriented critics sometimes accuse the book of being insufficiently radical, and the chapters on the Brotherhood were also often condemned—sometimes by readers who thought that Ellison had been unfair in depicting these Leftist radicals and sometimes by readers who felt that his satire, though deserved, was unconvincing.

Numerous readers have objected to the ending of the book: “The Epilogue,” in their view, concludes on a naively affirmative and optimistic note—a note that seems to contradict much of the rest of the novel. It is possible, of course, that Ellison intended this note to be ironic; if he did, however, many readers clearly missed his point. Nevertheless, even commentators who have been strongly critical of Invisible Man have frequently conceded its ambitious and innovative nature, and as the decades have passed, dissenting voices have grown weaker and less numerous.

For Discussion or Writing
1. How does Invisible Man both resemble and differ from Richard Wright’s novel Native Son? How are the protagonists different in their educational backgrounds, their personal ambitions, and their levels of intellectual development? Which book is more precisely focused on strictly racial themes? How are Leftist political organizations depicted in both works? Discuss the endings of the two novels.

2. Discuss the presentation of the theme of race relations in this novel and in William Faulkner’s Light in August. How are both the title character of Ellison’s novel and Joe Christmas in Faulkner’s book similar and/or different in their backgrounds, experiences, aspirations, and final fates? Discuss the roles of women in each novel, and discuss the presentation of socioeconomic class in each book.

3. Discuss the ways black life is presented in this book and in Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. How are women presented in each work? How is romance presented? Discuss the use of black dialect and folk traditions in both books. How are the plots of the two novels similar in their focus on the main character’s geographical movements and psychological development? How are the endings of the two books comparable?