Seminar in
American Literature
RESOURCES

Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man    

See Questions for Discussion at the Random House Reader's Guide to Invisible Man.
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brief biographical sketch

The American writer Ralph Waldo Ellison, b. Oklahoma City, Okla., Mar. 1, 1914, achieved international fame with his first novel, Invisible Man (1952). He was influenced early by the myth of the frontier, viewing the United States as a land of "infinite possibilities." The close-knit black community in which he grew up supplied him with images of courage and endurance and an interest in music.

From 1933 to 1936, Ellison attended Tuskegee Institute, intent upon pursuing a career in music; his readings in modern literature, however, interested him in writing. In 1936 he moved to New York City, met the novelist Richard Wright, and became associated with the Federal Writers' Project, publishing short stories and articles in such magazines as New Challenge and New Masses. These early details of his life, set down in Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social, and critical essays, enhance an understanding of Invisible Man. The influences of the frontier tradition, the black community, and Ellison's interest in music combined to create the richly symbolic, metaphorical language of the novel, as displayed in the Rhinehart and Mary Rambo episodes. Its theme, the human search for identity, also reflects Ellison's early interest in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, and Henry David Thoreau and his later debt to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Andre Malraux, and Wright. Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953. Since 1970, Ellison has been Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at New York University and has lectured extensively on black folk culture....

Addison Gayle

Bibliography: Benston, K.W., ed., Speaking for You: Ralph Ellison's Cultural Vision (1986); Hersey, John, ed., Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays (1974); O'Meally, R.G., The Craft of Ralph Ellison (1980).

Text Copyright © 1993 Grolier Incorporated [This text is from 1993; Ellison died in 1994.]
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Barron's BookNotes on Invisible Man
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ClassicNotes on Invisible Man
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from Irving Howe, "Black Boys and Native Sons"
First published in DISSENT (Autumn 1963). 

Invisible Man is a record of a Negro's journey through contemporary America, from South to North, province to city, naive faith to disenchantment and perhaps beyond. There are clear allegorical intentions (Ellison is "literary" to a fault) but with a book so rich in talk and drama it would be a shame to neglect the fascinating surface for the mere depths. The beginning is both nightmare and farce. A timid Negro boy comes to a white smoker in a Southern town: he is to be awarded a scholarship. Together with several other Negro boys he is rushed to the front of the ballroom, where a sumptuous blonde tantalizes and frightens them by dancing in the nude. Blindfolded, the Negro boys stage a "battle royal," a free-for-all in which they pummel each other to the drunken shouts of the whites. Practical jokes, humiliations, terror--and then the boy delivers a prepared speech of gratitude to his white benefactors. At the end of this section, the boy dreams that he has opened the briefcase given him together with his scholarship to a Negro college and that he finds an inscription reading: "To Whom It May Concern: Keep This Nigger-Boy Running."

He keeps running. He goes to his college and is expelled for having innocently taken a white donor through a Negro gin mill that also happens to be a brothel. His whole experience is to follow this pattern. Strip down a pretense, whether by choice or accident, and you will suffer penalties, since the rickety structure of Negro respectability rests upon pretense and those who profit from it cannot bear to have the reality exposed (in this case, that the college is dependent upon the Northern white millionaire). The boy then leaves for New York, where he works in a white paint factory, becomes a soapboxer for the Harlem Communists, the darling of the fellow-traveling bohemia, and a big wheel in the Negro world. At the end, after witnessing a frenzied race riot in Harlem, he "finds himself" in some not entirely specified way, and his odyssey from submission to autonomy is complete.

Ellison has an abundance of that primary talent without which neither craft nor intelligence can save a novelist: he is richly, wildly inventive; his scenes rise and dip with tension, his people bleed, his language sings. No other writer has captured so much of the hidden gloom and surface gaiety of Negro life.

There is a great deal of superbly rendered speech: a West Indian woman inciting her men to resist an eviction, a Southern sharecropper calmly describing how he seduced his daughter, a Harlem street vender spinning jive. The rhythm of Ellison's prose is harsh and nervous, like a beat of harried alertness. The observation is expert: he knows exactly how zoot-suiters walk, making stylization their principle of life, and exactly how the antagonism between American and West Indian Negroes works itself out in speech and humor. He can accept his people as they are, in their blindness and hope: here, finally, the Negro world does exist, seemingly apart from plight or protest. And in the final scene Ellison has created an unforgettable image: "Ras the Destroyer," a Negro nationalist, appears on a horse dressed in the costume of an Abyssinian chieftain, carrying spear and shield, and charging wildly into the police--a black Quixote, mad, absurd, unbearably pathetic.

But even Ellison cannot help being caught up with the idea of the Negro. To write simply about "Negro experience" with the aesthetic distance urged by the critics of the fifties is a moral and psychological impossibility, for plight and protest are inseparable from that experience, and even if less political than Wright and less prophetic than Baldwin, Ellison knows this quite as well as they do.

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"Man Underground" Saul Bellow's review of Invisible Man (1952)
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"The Rhetoric of AntiCommunism in Invisible Man" (College English, Sep. 1997)
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"Roads Taken and Not Taken: Post-Marxism, Anti-Racism, and Anticommunism," by Barbara Foley (1997)

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Aimée C. Taylor
English 7758
Dr. Nordquist
June 19, 2002

Ellison, Ralph. The Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1972.

*The best description of this novel is “a unity of opposites” (284). And the best advice is that when your “Golden Day” presents itself, run like hell! Trouble is just around the corner.

            What troubles me most about this novel is that it offers no real resolution. White and black characters alike constantly shoot down optimism. I can see why Ellison took just as much flack as other black writers such as Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston.  All three show what is wrong with society but without sound advice for change-unless you count communism as a means of change.

            The prologue is reminiscent of Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children. One word triggers extreme violence, and an attempt to explain the violent reaction falls short. Thus, the rest of the novel serves as a justification of why the character feels invisible and has the right to blame everyone. What he truly fails to do is take responsibility for his invisibility. No, he is not completely to blame nor is any one person. However, he certainly lives up to the self-fulfilling prophecy. He says, “I am an invisible man” because “people refuse to see me” (3). But he too chooses not to really see himself or other people until late in the novel. Yes, the whites treat him like a second-class citizen. Yes, he is wrongly accused. Yes, what can go wrong always does for him. He plays right into this though.

Like Wright, Ellison is demanding action, but his main character usually resorts to speech to move others to action instead of himself. Oration becomes a major element of the novel just as it does in Wright’s works. Intertwined throughout the novel is the meshing of the black experience of church, spirituals, folk tales, humor, etc. All of these experiences circle around oration.  The problem for Ellison’s narrator is a false sense of power associated with the oration. He is reminded time and time again that having people listen to his speech is not the same as having them understand the real meaning of his words. Power can be abused. (A great example of this misunderstanding is his realization that the reverend is blind.)

The novel serves as a continuation of Wright’s “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.” Maybe it is a stretch, but I kept imagining Wright as the grandfather on his deathbed. His last words are the Jim Crow laws, adding the clarification that abiding by these laws creates a duality for the black man-put on one façade for the blacks and another for the whites, but be careful to remember who you really are. Here stems the problem for our narrator. He does not know himself well enough to know which face is his. He knows the laws. For example, he knows it would be wrong to look at the white nude dancer. He knows he should say “sir” all of the time. He knows not to threaten anyone by showing initiative on the job. Yet at the same time he blames his grandfather for planting the seed that he has a different place in society. He does not want to play the game, despite having played it all along. (This is also demonstrated in Hurston’s work.) He experiences the Jim Crow laws as each is traced throughout Ellison’s novel. Characters just as invisible also echo the grandfather’s words but usually if not more such as the old vet who says, “Play the game, but don’t believe in it-that much you owe yourself” (151). But the narrator is blind before he is invisible!

Although the narrator experiences a series of small epiphanies, he never goes through catharsis, purging his mind of pity and fear. Instead, he seems to relish in them. He enjoys feeling sorry for himself. He enjoys blaming others. He enjoys dwelling in the past. It is not that he avoids hard work, humility or sacrifice. He just does not think he should have to endure them. Reliving his college memories becomes painful; a reminder of what slipped threw his hands. No it is not fair that he should be expelled, but a black man expelled him for the wrong reasons. Bledsoe wants to maintain power at the expense of this young man’s future. The lush landscape of perfuming flowers, green grass, and perfect symmetry is tainted by and parallel to the grotesque over abundance of this animalistic survivor Bledsoe. Greed is not colorblind. This is just one example of a black man forcing our narrator into invisibility.

The description of the founder’s statue is bewildering as it almost contradicts itself. The use of chalk for bird crap directly reminds the reader that the setting is an institution of learning, but the word “veil” offers multiple definitions, especially late in the novel. Throughout the novel, the narrator reconsiders whether the veil is being raised or lowered. Even though these blacks are being educated, it is by white men, hoping to blind them against what is actually occurring. The white man’s idea of helping to educate the black man becomes a huge debate. Ellison shows that gaining any kind of an education can be risky. Our narrator is at a disadvantage for having three years of college. His education scares people-black and white. Other forms of education also exist in the novel. Trueblood’s incestual act and impregnation of his daughter shows him fulfilling the stereotype for black men-uncontrollable sexual urges and violence- as he educates Mr. Norton about his reasons. The white man feels compelled, forced, to take care of him, which is ironic because blacks had been doing the manual labor, which helped “take care of” whites for multiple generations. Educated blacks see this as problematic, but even Trueblood cannot understand why he is better off now after having committed such a horrible crime against his own child. Is the veil being raised or lowered? In chapter 4 the narrator says, “Then a veil seemed to fall” (101). The narrator actually pulls the veil over his own eyes. The narrator acts like a slave to his master just as he watches Bledsoe bow down before Mr. Norton. The narrator is surrounded by hypocrisy and cannot explain it through his formal education. After being expelled, his informal education begins. On page 132-133 the “veiled street lamp-which cast shadows upon the bank of grass below me” is not a pleasant experience either.

In the introduction Ellison says, “…I would have to improvise upon my materials in the manner of a jazz musician putting a musical theme through a wild star-burst of metamorphosis” (xix). The narrator painfully goes through a metamorphosis but not a good one. There is no pretty new creature at the end. A human has become a creature, a rat, a being of contradicting darkness and light. The musical qualities of the novel go hand and hand with the play on colors. A fluidity of motions, melodies, references, and uncertainty revolve through dark and light. A sense of unavoidable doom does not just lurk in the darkness though. And springtime is not always a time of rebirth. Spring time reminds him of college which reminds him of how and why he left which brings him right back to his miserable present. White is not always right, pure, innocent, sterile, etc. Black is not always bad, stupid, wrong, powerless. White and black often blend into grays. In fact, the narrator spends a good part of the novel in the “gray zone,” confused by light but wanting to surround himself in it in order to remind himself that he has form, searching in darkness for answers to questions he despises, turning outward for answers that ultimately are found inside.

The novel becomes a sermon that actually denounces the power of sermons. The moving orator becomes lost in his own words. The mocking bird on page 132 shows us this hypocrisy again. He is his worst enemy because he cannot move on. He enjoys living in his hole. He does exactly what he accuses others of-making him invisible to the truth and to existence.

Stylistically Ellison shows his mastery of language. The novel is problematic in that it is not accessible to everyone who needs to read it. The language is elevated- even pompous in parts, condescending to those not with formal educations. On the other hand, his constant allusions to black folk tales make it difficult for whites. He is particularly fond of   “Tar Baby” and variations of the “Rabbit”. The communist references make it difficult for just about everyone. The musical suggestions are a little easier to grasp, but an appreciation of jazz certainly would be beneficial. Ellison shows that he is not the narrator, nor is he any other character in the novel. The closest one is grandpa, but grandpa is dead. He is not even the voice of reason but one of explanation. Jumping from extreme contradictions, always pitting one idea against another, one color against another, one sound against another, one view against another, he creates a hypnotic rhythm in the novel that helps move the plot along. The narration is the strength of the novel because the dialogue at times seems artificial, forced, not as the characters would really sound. In a way, the characters are too smart. The words of wisdom that drip off the tongues of the crazy vets are not plausible. The dialogue is so thought provoking that it does not seem real, natural.

What does the novel mean as a whole? Ellison obviously does show the problems of inequality, racism, and the differing types of education. He justifies why people resort to violence, self-hate, denial, and lose optimism. What he does not do is offer hope, faith, or solutions. Was this his intent? Was he compelled to teach a lesson or just make observations? If the novel is more than black and white, why does he refer to the color yellow so often? Is he afraid of “mixing” the races? Is one race more susceptible to being tainted? Are we more visible because we recognize invisibility in the narrator? Are we part of the problem? Is anyone effectual? Who is the strongest character in the novel and why? Why does he refer to hibernating like a bear? Is the bear also a reference to politics? The economy? Animalistic instincts? Where is the humanity among the races, and why can we not just become the “human race”? What is Ellison’s purpose?   Why is the college juxtapose with the asylum? If freedom is “knowing how to say what I got up in my head” (11), why does it take over 500 pages to say it?