Invisible Man

Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
read: 2013
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #19, Guardian 1000 Novels, National Book Award

Invisible Man gets grouped with Native Son a lot, as Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright were friends and contemporaries and both novels deal with the travails of a young black man in a big city and what that says about larger society. So I expected Invisible Man to be a similar book, a naturalistic take on the sociological factors that oppress African-Americans. There's some of that in the novel, but there's also an absurdist element that wouldn't be out of place in Kafka, Pynchon, or Chesterton. Nothing that happens is fantastic in the strictest sense, but the opening sets the tone for the novel: our (never-named) protagonist / narrator is living underground, lit by 1,369 light bulbs powered by stolen electricity, constantly playing the same jazz record over and over. Through the course of the novel, the narrator travels with a white man to a wild black bar, gets experimented on as a patient after a chemical plant explosion, is taken in by a kindly woman with a cartoonish caricature bank of a black face, becomes a famous spokesman for the Communists, and becomes a hated figure and target in riots that engulf Harlem. The book teeters on the edge of sanity for its duration.

The narrator seems buffeted from by forces on all sides, never able to define who he is. Is he the good boy student that his college (and white society) want him to be? Should he throw in with the unions or the Communists? Should he rebel against white society all together? He is a symbol of the impossibility of a black man defining himself in an oppressive world, but part of his plight is in being a symbol, someone who keeps changing his identity according to the whims of those around him. Only when he disengages from all society, becoming invisible to all (including the blacks and the Communists) does he acquire his own voice.

Invisible Man is justifiably considered one of the great works in American literature, so I was fascinated to see what else Ellison wrote. However, it was Ellison's only novel, even though he lived another forty years. That's amazing.