Invisible Man

I’m pretty certain Invisible Man is The Great American Novel. Some lines make me laugh aloud: “I would remain and become a well-disciplined optimist and help them to go merrily to hell.” But the moments that really sing for me are those that ring with humor, horror, tragedy, and beauty all at once.

Near the end, during a moment when the nameless narrator hides and listens to some men telling a story, he aches with the urge to laugh while realizing what’s been said isn’t only funny: “It was funny and dangerous and sad.” The book reminds me that all… show more.

One of America’s greatest novels, Invisible Man is a veritable potpourri of African American Folklore. 

I, and most other professors, always have this novel at the head of our list of readings for courses in African American literature, culture, and/or folklore. There are probably more studies of this novel than of any other African American novel. 

This gripping, symphonic novel about coming of age in pre-Civil Rights America, with its skillful weaving of narrative modes and perspectives, is an all-time favorite of mine.

Themes of longing and belonging, failed authority, violence, shame and despair, performance and hope return repeatedly, always slightly changed, as the nameless protagonist—Invisible Man—learns that he is a stranger to white America, who does not know how to see him, only skin color through a racist lens.

Invisible Man learns to open spaces for things not yet present or recognized, like Black political organizing, by using Black and other art forms—jazz, spirituals, anonymous… show more.

Ellison taught me a novel can sound like music.

Using only words on paper Ellison performs a long jazz improvisation that will enrapture you from the first line to the last. The book is about a black man in 1930s America who struggles to be seen in a society who not only refuses to acknowledge his existence, but does everything in its power to crush him into nothingness.

Check out this first line: “I am an Invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I… show more.

Invisible Man, another Harlem novel, is deeply concerned with comeuppance. The titular character is a bit of a cipher at the beginning of the story, but as he is increasingly railroaded, deceived, and exploited he grows certain that he must shake all the forces bearing down on him. That realization that gaining freedom will piss off his many adversaries, and his struggle to secure his autonomy as the novel comes to a head, always strikes me as vengeful. 

I read Invisible Man in one sitting my freshman year of college. I was enraptured with its sensitive, poignant portrayal of being rendered invisible by racism. Despite not being a Black man, I understand the experience of being rendered invisible, and how much effort it takes to demand to be seen and heard when others attempt to erase you. Although there are many sad and infuriating moments in this book, ultimately it is a book about resilience and survival. I am deeply moved by the use of the metaphor of invisibility to examine and understand the devastation systemic racism leaves… show more.

It is wrong to say that the title character of Ellison’s novel can’t get his stuff together. More accurately, the world of mid-20th century America can’t figure out how to give an African American man his visibility and his humanity. Ellison has always shown me that the crisis of men is the crisis of race, of gender, of class.   

You may in fact have read this in college as I did, but it will richly reward a return. The protagonist doesn’t have a name because his humanity is invisible to the white world. Sitting in a room with its hundreds of lightbulbs run on power stolen from the city, he reflects on the life that brought him from the rural South to Harlem, and it’s all one grotesque, horrible, comic, and inescapable bad dream. No one sees him, but everyone, from sadistic southern whites, to black nationalists, to the doctrinaire Leftists of “The Brotherhood,” wants to use him.

This… show more.

Invisible Man is a tour-de-force exploration of what it is to be Black in America, but it is also much more. While I love it for the lush, jazz-inspired originality of its prose and the endless inventiveness of the plot, Invisible Man, despite its specificity and the terrifying view it offers into the cruelty (sometimes thoughtless, most often intentional) begat by America’s obsession with race, is also a book that helps us understand what it means to be the “other” in any place, at any time, in any culture. Ellison’s only novel is a monument to his compassion, a… show more.

I fell in love with this book before I even read it; I came upon the author’s acceptance speech for the National Book Award: “There must be a fiction which, leaving sociology to the scientists, can arrive at the truth about the human condition, here and now, with all the bright magic of a fairy tale.” On the surface, Ellison’s novel is about one Black man’s power struggle to achieve equilibrium -- albeit unrealistic -- in a world “owned” by others. This symbiotic relationship turns from ennobling to pernicious in the flip of a page. The undercurrent simmers with anger,… show more.