Notes on Invisible Man

Written in the politically and socially turbulent 1940s, Invisible Man is one of the definitive novels of the African-American experience; it is also one of the definitive novels for all Americans. The issues Ellison so powerfully addresses are those that confront everyone who lives in the modern world: not only racism but the very question of personal identity, our frustrated impulse to assert ourselves in a world which is metaphorically blind. Ellison's hero is invisible within the larger culture because he is black, but his feelings can easily be understood by all those who experience the anonymity of modern life. Shortly before his death Ellison acknowledged the fact that his novel had expanded the very meaning of the word "invisible." Invisibility, he said, "touches anyone who lives in a big metropolis." (New Yorker, 5/2/94)

The novel's nameless narrator (the Invisible Man) is representative of many intelligent young African-Americans of his generation. Born and raised in the rural South, he is a star pupil at a college for black students. He dreams of racial uplift through humility and hard work, a doctrine preached by the school and the larger Southern culture. When his innocent idealism lands him in trouble, he comes to understand the hypocrisy behind the school's professed philosophy.

The naive young man is "educated" by being slowly disabused of all his ideals. Despite this, in the end he chooses to reject cynicism and hatred and to embrace a philosophy of hope. Ellison wanted his novel to transcend the rage and hopelessness of the protest novel and assert a world of possibility, however remote. It is surreal because "life is surreal," and it is funny—often hilariously so—because "what else was there to sustain our will to persevere but laughter?" [p. xv]. The novel also reflects the rhetorical richness of the African-American culture, using a wide range of idiomatic styles. Ellison's anti-realism stood out at a time when realism was the dominant fictional style, particularly in the protest novel. Through it he asserts the excitement of human experience in a world in which the unexpected is always happening.

“In our society, it is not unusual for a Negro to experience a sensation that he does not exist in the real world at all. He seems rather to exist in the nightmarish fantasy of the white American mind as a phantom that the white mind seeks unceasingly, by means both crude and subtle, to slay.” (“An American Dilemma: A Review,” Shadow and Act)
Often described as a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story, Invisible Man is the tale of a black man’s search for identity and visibility in white America. Convinced that his existence depends on gaining the support, recognition, and approval of whites—whom he has been taught to view as powerful, superior beings who control his destiny—the narrator spends nearly 20 years trying to establish his humanity in a society that refuses to see him as a human being. Ultimately, he realizes that he must create his own identity, which rests not on the acceptance of whites, but on his own acceptance of the past.
Published in 1952, more than a decade before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 declared racial segregation illegal, Invisible Man spans approximately 20 years, tracing the narrator’s life from his high school graduation in Greenwood, South Carolina, to his involvement in the Harlem Riot of 1943. By tracing the narrator’s journey from the rural South to the urban North, the novel emulates the movement of the slave narratives, autobiographies written by formerly enslaved black Africans that trace their escape routes from bondage in the South to freedom in the North. This fact is important to our understanding of Invisible Man, because allusions to Frederick Douglass (like the narrator’s grandfather) symbolize the ghost of slavery alluded to at several critical points in the novel.
The narrator’s path also traces the path of thousands of Southern blacks who moved to the North during the 1930s and 40s in search of better jobs and new opportunities during the Great Migration.
Call and response—a concept rooted in the traditional Negro sermons in which the pastor’s impassioned call elicits an equally impassioned response from the congregation—is one of the defining elements of African American literature. With this in mind, Invisible Man can be read as a response to Langston Hughes’ poem, “Harlem,” which poses the question, “What happens to a dream deferred? . . . Does it explode?” According to Ellison, who also explores the myth of the American Dream, the answer is a resounding, “Yes!” In addition to Langston Hughes, the two authors who had the greatest influence on Ellison’s writing style were T. S. Eliot and Richard Wright. Ellison was especially intrigued with Eliot’s Wasteland, a poem that explores the spiritual wasteland of contemporary society, and with Wright’s acclaimed protest novel, Native Son, and his nonfiction work, 12 Million Black Voices, which Ellison felt was even more powerful than Native Son. Ellison was also influenced by H.G. Wells’ science fiction novel, The Invisible Man, and Richard Wright’s short story, “The Man Who Lived Underground.”
A complex, multi-layered novel, Invisible Man can be read as an allegory (a story with both a literal and symbolic meaning that can be read, understood, and interpreted at several levels) that traces the narrator’s perilous journey from innocence to experience and from blind ignorance to enlightened awareness. Invisible Man can also be read as a quest narrative (mono-myth). Like Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Divine Comedy—both of which are alluded to in the novel—Invisible Man involves a symbolic journey to the underworld, where the narrator must meet and defeat various monsters—such as Brother Jack—and overcome seemingly impossible trials in order to return home.
Ellison’s use of inverted reality, creating a world that mirrors the reality of the white world, is a key structural element in Invisible Man. In the narrator’s world, black is white, up is down, light is darkness, and insanity is sanity. This structural device is used to illustrate that blacks, due to their perceived inferior status in American society, often experience a radically different reality than whites, creating the illusion that blacks and whites live in two different worlds. The white man’s American dream is the black man’s nightmare, and behavior deemed normal for whites is deemed abnormal (or crazy) for blacks. A key example is the novel’s closing scene: The narrator returns to his underground home, the basement (coal cellar) of a whites-only apartment building. Although this can be viewed as a physical move down into darkness and despair, in the narrator’s inverted reality, his return to his underground habitat illustrates a psychological move up towards awareness and enlightenment.
Unlike conventional novels that present a series of related sequential events, Invisible Man consists of a series of seemingly unrelated scenes or episodes—often expressed in the form of stories or sermons—linked only by the narrator’s comments and observations. In this way, the structure of the novel mirrors the structure of a jazz composition, players stepping forward to perform their impromptu solos, then stepping back to rejoin their group.
The structure also emulates the oral tradition of preliterate societies. Passed down orally from generation to generation, their stories embodied a people’s culture and history. In the novel, each character’s story can be viewed as a lesson that contributes to the narrator’s growth and awareness, bringing him closer to an understanding of his own people’s culture and history.
(Notes)