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Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison


REFERENCE

THE CRITICS

CENTRAL THEMES

Well, there are certain themes, symbols and images which are based on folk material. For example, there is the old saying amongst Negroes: If you're black, stay back; if you're brown, stick around; if you're white, you're right. And there is the joke Negroes tell on themselves about their being so black they can't be seen in the dark. In my book this sort of thing was merged with the meanings which blackness and light have long had in Western mythology: evil and goodness, ignorance and knowledge, and so on. In my novel the narrator's development is one through blackness to light; that is, from ignorance to enlightenment: invisibility to visibility. He leaves the South and goes North; this, as you will notice in reading Negro folktales, is always the road to freedom- the movement upward. You have the same thing again when he leaves his underground cave for the open.

Ralph Ellison, "The Art of Fiction: An Interview," 1955

THE SYMBOLISM OF VISION

Ralph Ellison, in Invisible Man, relies heavily on the symbolism of vision: light, color, perception, sight, insight. These, his master symbols, are organically related to the dualism of black and white, the all-absorbing and bafflingly complex problem of identity. How does the Negro see himself and how do others see him? Do they notice him at all? Do they really see him as he is or do they behold a stereotype, a ghostly caricature, a traditionally accepted myth? What we get in this novel, creatively elaborated, is the drama of symbolic action, the language of the eyes, the incredibly complex and subtle symbolism of vision. All this is structurally bound up with the underlying theme of transformation. All this is imaginatively and, for the most part, successfully worked out in terms of fiction.

Charles I. Glicksberg, "The Symbolism of Vision," 1954

THE NARRATOR AS ARTIST

A profitable method of dealing with Invisible Man is to see the action as a series of initiations in which the hero passes through several stages and groups of identification. The changes of identity are accompanied by somewhat formal rituals resembling the primitive's rites of passage. The primitive recognizes that man changes his identity as he passes from one stage or group to another and accompanies this transition by rituals that are essentially symbolic representations of birth, purification and regeneration in nature.

Ellison's narrative is a series of such initiatory experiences set within a cyclical framework of the mystic initiation of the artist. The rites of passage take the hero through several stages in which he acts out his various and conflicting sub-personalities. When he has won his freedom he is reborn as the artist, the only actor in our society whose "end" is a search beneath the label for what is individual.

Ellin Horowitz, "The Rebirth of the Artist," 1964

ELLISON'S DEPICTION OF THE COMMUNISTS

If Native Son is marred by the ideological delusions of the thirties, Invisible Man is marred, less grossly, by those of the fifties. The middle section of Ellison's novel, dealing with the Harlem Communists, does not ring quite true, in the way a good portion of the writings on this theme during the post-war years does not ring quite true. Ellison makes his Stalinist figures so vicious and stupid that one cannot understand how they could ever have attracted him or any other Negro. That the party leadership manipulated members with deliberate cynicism is beyond doubt, but this cynicism was surely more complex and guarded than Ellison shows it to be. No party leader would ever tell a prominent Negro Communist, as one of them does in Invisible Man: "You were not hired [as a functionary] to think"- even if that were what he felt. Such passages are almost as damaging as the propagandist outbursts in Native Son.

Irving Howe, A World More Attractive, 1963

THE PROTAGONIST AS UNIVERSAL MAN

I hesitate to call Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) a Negro novel, though of course it is written by a Negro and is centrally concerned with the experiences of a Negro. The appellation is not so much inaccurate as it is misleading. A novelist treating the invisibility and phantasmagoria of the Negro's life in this "democracy" is, if he tells the truth, necessarily writing a very special kind of book. Yet if his novel is interesting only because of its specialness, he has not violated the surface of his subject; he has not, after all, been serious. Despite the differences in their external concerns, Ellison has more in common as a novelist with Joyce, Melville, Camus, Kafka, West, and Faulkner than he does with other serious Negro writers like James Baldwin and Richard Wright. To concentrate on the idiom of a serious novel, no matter how distinctive its peculiarities, is to depreciate it, to minimize the universality of its implications. Though the protagonist of Invisible Man is a southern Negro, he is, in Ellison's rendering, profoundly all of us.

Jonathan Baumbach, The Landscape of Nightmare, 1965

THE DESIGN OF THE PLOT

The plot structure of Invisible Man is schematic. The novel uses a cumulative plot (in M. C. Bradbrook's illuminating terminology), developing the same basic episode over and over in an emotional crescendo: the protagonist struggles idealistically to live by the commandments of his immediate social group, then is undone by the hypocrisy built into the social structure and is plunged into despair. This happens in four large movements: 1) the struggle into college, the failure with Norton and expulsion from the "paradise" of the college; 2) job-hunting in New York, Emerson's disillusioning lecture and the battle and explosion at Liberty Paints; 3) the "resurrection" or reconstruction of the protagonist, his plunge into radical activism and his purge by the Brotherhood; 4) the meeting with Rinehart, the beginning of the riots and the protagonist's confrontation and defeat of Ras, ending in the flight underground. Each episode is a development to a climax followed by a peripeteia. The novel's prologue and epilogue simply frame this series of climaxes and reversals and interpret the emotional collapse of the invisible man in the present tense.

William J. Schafer, "Ralph Ellison and the Birth of the Anti-Hero," 1968

THE SYMBOLISM OF NAMES

Characters' names, and the club names, and the names of factories, places and institutions- even the names of things, like the Sambo doll- Can be explored indefinitely in this novel. The Brotherhood has its parties at a place called the Chthonian Club, which is a classical reference comparable to that of the Sybils. The Chthonian realm belonged to the underground gods and spirits; and true power for Ellison is an underground influence as we learn from seeing Bledsoe and Brockway and Brother Jack in action, as well as the invisible man writing in his hole. Where does Ras get his name, with its vocal nearness to "race"? He gives it to himself, as the invisible man gives us the name we must call him by if we are to know him for what he is.

Thomas A. Vogler, "Invisible Man: Somebody's Protest Novel," 1970

THE NARRATOR'S ODYSSEY TO SELFHOOD

The odyssey which the narrator, with the aid of 1,369 light bulbs, looks back on takes place on many levels. His travelling is geographic, social, historical and philosophical. In an early dream he finds inside his brief-case an envelope which contains an endless recession of smaller envelopes, the last of which contains the simple message "Keep This Nigger-Boy Running." It is only at the end when he finally burns all the contents of his real brief-case that he can start to control his own momentum. Up to that point his movements are really controlled from without, just like the people in the New York streets who to him seem to walk as though they were directed by "some unseen control." The pattern of his life is one of constraint and eviction; he is alternately cramped and dispossessed. This is true of his experience in the college, the factory, the hospital, the Party. What he discovers is that every institution is bent on processing and programming the individual in a certain way; yet if a man does not have a place in any of the social structures the danger is that he might fall into chaos.

Tony Tanner, "The Music of Invisibility," 1973

THE WISDOM OF BLACK FOLK EXPERIENCE

Invisible Man is not a historical novel, of course, but it deals with the past as a burden and as a stepping stone to the future. The hero discovers that history moves not like an arrow or an objective, scientific argument, but like a boomerang: swiftly, cyclically, and dangerously. He sees that when he is not conscious of the past, he is liable to be slammed in the head with it again when it circles back. As the novel unfolds, the Invisible Man learns that by accepting and evaluating all parts of his experience, smooth and ragged, loved and unloved, he is able to "look around corners" into the future:

At the beginning of the novel, the Invisible Man presents himself as a kind of Afro-American Jonathan, a "green" yokel pushed into the clownhouse of American society. He starts out ignorant of his society, his past, himself. By the end of the book he accepts his southern black folk past and sees that ordinary blacks like his grandfather, Trueblood, Mary, Tarp, Dupre, the unnamed boys in the subway, and himself are of ultimate value, no matter what the Bledsoes and Jacks say. Jarred to consciousness by folklore (among other things), the Invisible Man realizes that the tested wisdom expressed in spirituals, blues, dozens, and stories is a vital part of his experience. At last he comprehends that whatever he might do to be "so black and blue," he is, simply, who he is.

Robert G. O'Meally, The Craft of Ralph Ellison, 1980

[Invisible Man Contents]


ADVISORY BOARD

We wish to thank the following educators who helped us focus our Book Notes series to meet student needs and critiqued our manuscripts to provide quality materials.

Sandra Dunn, English Teacher
Hempstead High School, Hempstead, New York

Lawrence J. Epstein, Associate Professor of English
Suffolk County Community College, Selden, New York

Leonard Gardner, Lecturer, English Department
State University of New York at Stony Brook

Beverly A. Haley, Member, Advisory Committee
National Council of Teachers of English Student Guide Series
Fort Morgan, Colorado

Elaine C. Johnson, English Teacher
Tamalpais Union High School District
Mill Valley, California

Marvin J. LaHood, Professor of English
State University of New York College at Buffalo

Robert Lecker, Associate Professor of English
McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

David E. Manly, Professor of Educational Studies
State University of New York College at Geneseo

Bruce Miller, Associate Professor of Education
State University of New York at Buffalo

Frank O'Hare, Professor of English and Director of Writing
Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

Faith Z. Schullstrom, Member of Executive Committee
National Council of Teachers of English
Director of Curriculum and Instruction
Guilderland Central School District, New York

Mattie C. Williams, Director, Bureau of Language Arts
Chicago Public Schools, Chicago, Illinois

[Invisible Man Contents]


BIBLIOGRAPHY

FURTHER READING
CRITICAL WORKS

Baumbach, Jonathan. The Landscape of Nightmare. New York: New York University Press, 1965.

Bone, Robert. Anger and Beyond. New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

Gibson, Donald B., ed. Five Black Writers. New York: New York University Press, 1970.

Glicksberg, Charles I. "The Symbolism of Vision." Southwest Review 39 (Summer 1954), pp. 259-65.

Hersey, John, ed. Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice- Hall, 1970.

Horowitz, Ellin. "The Rebirth of the Artist." In Richard Kostelanetz, ed. On Contemporary Literature. New York: Avon Books, 1964.

Horowitz, Floyd R. "Ralph Ellison's Modern Version of Brer Bear and Brer Rabbit in Invisible Man." Midcontinent American Studies Journal IV (2) (1963): 21-27.

Howe, Irving. A World More Attractive. New York: Horizon Press, 1963.

Kaiser, Ernest. "Negro Images in American Writing." Freedomways 7 (Spring 1967), pp. 152-63.

Klein, Marcus. After Alienation. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Co., 1964.

Neal, Larry. "Ellison's Zoot Suit." Black World 20 (2) (December 1970), pp. 31-50.

Olderman, Raymond. "Ralph Ellison's Blues and Invisible Man." Wisconsin Studies in Literature 7 (1966): 142-57.

O'Meally, Robert G. The Craft of Ralph Ellison. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980.

_____. "Ralph Ellison's Invisible Novel." The New Republic (January 17, 1981), pp. 26- 29.

Reilly, John M., ed. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Invisible Man. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970.

Rovit, Earl H. "Ralph Ellison and the American Comic Tradition." Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature 1 (Fall 1960), pp. 34-42.

Schafer, William J. "Ralph Ellison and the Birth of the Anti-Hero." Critique 10 (1968): 81-93.

Tanner, Tony. In City of Words: American Fiction, 1950-1970. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Vogler, Thomas A. "Invisible Man: Somebody's Protest Novel." Iowa Review 1 (Spring 1970), pp. 64-82.

AUTHOR'S OTHER WORKS

Invisible Man is Ellison's first and only published novel. Since the publication of Invisible Man in 1952, Ellison has worked extensively on another novel, portions of which have been published as short stories. The long-awaited second novel had not appeared by the mid-1980s. Ellison's only other book- length work is Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), a collection of essays and interviews. Ellison's most important stories, essays, and interviews are listed below by title and date of original publication.

[New book by Ralph Ellison]

STORIES

    "Flying Home," In Edwin Seaver, ed. Cross Section. New York: L. B. Fischer, 1944, pp. 469-85.
    "King of the Bingo Game," Tomorrow 3 (July 1944), pp. 29-33.
    "And Hickman Arrives." Noble Savage 1 (1960): 5-49.

ESSAYS

    "Richard Wright's Blues." Antioch Review, 5 (Summer 1945), pp. 198-211.
    "The World and the Jug," New Leader 46 (9 December 1963), pp. 22-26.
    "Hidden Name and Complex Fate," In Ralph Ellison and Karl Shapiro, eds. The Writer's Experience. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1964, pp. 1-15.
    "Remembering Jimmy," Saturday Review 41 (July 12, 1958), pp. 36-37.
    "Introduction" to Invisible Man. Thirtieth Anniversary Edition. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.

INTERVIEWS

    "The Art of Fiction: An Interview," Paris Review 8 (Spring 1955), pp. 55-71.
    "That Same Pain, That Same Pleasure: An Interview." R. G. Stern. December 3 (Winter 1961), pp. 30-32, 37-46.
    "Introduction: A Completion of Personality" (interview with John Hersey). In John Hersey, ed. Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974.

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