This work, written while Southern blacks were still oppressed by Jim Crow, chronicles what it was like to come of age in mid-twentieth-century America as a black man. The title is apt: The main character, whose name is never disclosed by the author, feels as though he is invisible to the world. This is true not only in the American South but also in the American North. Eventually, he learns to embrace this invisibility and leaves readers wondering about their own invisibility towards the rest of the world.
This book starts out in a Southern collegiate setting and then transitions to Harlem. The main character originally aspires to a life of freedom in New York, much like Frederick Douglass had as a free man in the nineteenth century. However, instead of freedom, the main character experiences several weird happenings – things as grotesque as being involved in a boxing match or seeing a dear friend be shot to death as a cop. And as much as he would like to put the cloak of professional respectability on his life, he begins to realize that blacks are also oppressed in New York.
The grotesqueness of modern life harkens to the genre of Southern Gothic. Ellison wants us to see the author as the “everyman” of the black male and ultimately to see ourselves in him as just an everyman. I find that Ellison is successful in this task, and evidently, many others have as well as this book won a National Book Award in 1953.
Like many writings that address racism, the written word does a great job at confronting our bigotry. Black skin and white skin (and the many shades in between) are more muted on the page to the occasional adjective. Instead, words open us up to our common human experience which transcends petty discriminations.
This book would still serve high school students well as a coming-of-age text. Eyes (like mine) would be opened to what it was like – and is in some respect still like – to ease into American society as a black man. We are all very much invisible. That is, our thoughts and feelings are often irrelevant to the larger society around us. Nonetheless, we must speak and acts because our words can save us – save only us, not our fellow humans. We are worth saving because we are human. That struggle for self-esteem and self-dignity conveys the journey each of us is on. Ellison’s work was and is masterful in communicating this theme.
Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
Copyright (c) 1947, 1948, 1952, 1980
ISBN13 9780679732761
Page Count: 581
Genre: Fiction, African-American Literature
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