"Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison

Upon its 1947 publication Invisible Man became a cultural phenomenon. It’s easy to see why. In it Ralph Ellison produces a novel-length polemic observing and decrying the treatment of blacks in America. A first-person African-American man’s consciousness changes from the accepting subservience (and bootlicking) during his college years to big-city radical political activism, to a disillusioned resignation, through which he finally emerges a thoughtful, perhaps hopeful, individual. It’s a vivid indictment, and required reading for anyone even reflecting casually on race relations in the modern world.

From the outset we witness the shocking prejudice and mistreatment of African- Americans in the Depression-era United States. But because he shows skill in parroting back the “modern” Negro approach of acceptance through good manners and mindfulness-of-his-place, his native Southern town grants him a scholarship to college.

Through no fault of his own, he runs afoul of the college administration and is expelled. After he removes to New York his skill as a speechmaker lands him work in a subversive political organization, where he eventually chafes under the boot-heel of a central committee’s iron discipline. His career there disintegrates during a vivid description of the Harlem riot of 1935.

Of overarching importance: Ellison’s recounting in cringe-worthy detail a broad sample of the degrading stereotypes and rituals white people employed to keep blacks in their “place.” These accrete a weight as the book progresses, and establish the background in which our story takes place. They distill to the razor-sharp tip of Ellison’s spear; he aims this weapon at American race relations and lets fly.

However, in his introduction to the 1981 re-issue, Ellison cites Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” and observes “ … that a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation’s vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal.” It’s difficult to find any passages in “Invisible Man” that indicate a course toward the “democratic ideal.”

His invisibility evolves from his withdrawal from all aspects of his world and life. He lives where he can’t be seen, he understands his voice will be ignored by all sectors of society, be they black, white, radical, or reactionary, or any combination. He first encounters the idea of invisibility on the bus between his native South and New York. He is distressed to see the “vet” on the bus, the black onetime doctor and current mental patient who caused him so much trouble at the whorehouse where he found himself one fateful day.

The vet tells him:

Play the game, but don’t believe in it - that much you owe yourself. Even if it lands you in a strait jacket or a padded cell. Play the game, but play it your own way - part of the time at least. Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate - I wish I had time to tell you only a fragment. We’re an ass-backward people, though. You might even beat the game. It’s really a very crude affair. … You’re hidden right out in the open - that is, you would be if you only realized it. They wouldn’t see you because they don’t expect you to know anything …”

After affirming in the Epilogue that he is forced into action, and cannot remain invisible, or at least that he can’t remain on the sideline, the narrator says:

So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? … There seems to be no escape. … I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some if it down I have to love. I sell you no phony forgiveness, I’m a desperate man - but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I renounce and I defend and I hate and I love.”

The author takes pains to describe an outcome, a result of his journey. 

Thus, having tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out, I must emerge. And there’s still a conflict within me: With Louis Armstrong one half of me says, ‘Open the window and let the foul air out,’ while the other says, ‘It was good green corn before the harvest.’ Of course Louis was kidding, he wouldn’t have thrown old Bad Air out, because it would have broken up the music and the dance, when it was the good music that came from the bell of old Bad Air’s horn that counted.”

So ultimately, Ellison’s narrator finds that love is necessary to telling his story, but that the love will always be mixed, polluted, by rampant hate and repudiation.

As I said, it’s easy to see why this title has risen to such prominence. Angry but wise to the human condition, unforgiving even as it admits to limited hope, “Invisible Man” remains a canonical work illuminating an issue still vexing America today.