REVIEW

Reading a bildungsroman can be a grueling but rewarding task. In Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, a nameless nineteen-year-old black man’s story starts with the formal introduction: “I am an invisible man.” Immediately, you can tell Ellison is a gifted writer and storyteller. Beginning at a slow pace, the narrator describes himself as an educated black man, one that sees past the ignorance of his kind, ashamed of them, above them, and hides behind his origins with diplomas and the validation of white people. His sole purpose is to climb the social ladder to equality, where they will look upon him with admiration, call him by his name, deem him, qualify him, and address him a human being.

“It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!”

Selected amongst the students to give a speech to the town's leading white citizens, he instead walks into a bedlam of humiliation where they blindfold black men, put them in a ring, and force them to fight. Written in first-person, the scene described by a meek, all-accepting, mechanical protagonist exposes a reality of the black perspective amid the most prominent civil rights movement in American History: powerless, mechanical, meek.

“…sometimes when special white guests visited the school, he [Trueblood] was brought up along with the members of a country quartet to sing what the officials called “their primitive spirituals” when we assembled in the chapel on Sunday evenings. We were embarrassed by the earthy harmonies they sang, but since the visitors were awed we dared not laugh at the crude, high, plaintively animal sounds Jim Trueblood made as he led the quartet. That had all passed now with his disgrace, and what on the part of the school officials had been an attitude of contempt blunted by tolerance, had now become a contempt sharpened by hate. I didn’t understand in those pre-invisible days that their hate, and mine too, was charged with fear. How all of us at the college hated the black-belt people, the “peasants,” during those days!”

Ellison writes the events encountered by the narrator with sneaky objectivity. It's as though some of these happenings and conversations this young black man encounters fall into a morally gray spectrum.Is this wrong? Is this right? Is this just? Is this fair? Artfully, Ellison captures the covert underbelly of systemic racism during this period, even as our naive narrator migrates from the tight shackles of the South to the 'freed' depths of Harlem and into the Brotherhood in which his entire world crumbles.

“You see,” he said turning to Mr. Norton, “he has eyes and ears and a good distended African nose, but he fails to understand the simple facts of life. Understand. Understand? It’s worse than that. He registers with his senses but short-circuits his brain. Nothing has meaning. He takes it in but he doesn’t digest it. Already he is — well, bless my soul! Behold! a walking zombie! Already he’s learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He’s invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your [white man’s] dreams, sir! The mechanical man!”

Ellison not only portrays the narrator's journey through amplifying cognitive awareness but highlights the disparity of the times through symbols, dialects, religion, music, women, food, and poverty, never failing to capture the vestiges of slavery among black elders and their kin. The narrator, a black man once so blind as to flush under a white person's gaze, searches for a knowingness, a strategy, the words to liberate his black brothers and sisters from their oppression — oppression that bleeds down their lineage after centuries of barbarism that bore a hatred so ironclad within their spirit. Through this journey of the self, the intransigent young black man sets forth on the path toward truth, toward freedom for himself and his people.

“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”

MASTERPIECE

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