Invisible Man

Invisible Man, novel by Ralph Ellison, published in 1952. It was Ellison’s only novel to be published during his lifetime. Invisible Man is widely acknowledged as one of the great novels of American literature and a landmark in African American literature, winning the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, the first novel by a Black author to receive that honour.

Summary

The narrator of Invisible Man is a nameless young Black man who moves in a 20th-century United States where reality is surreal and who can survive only through pretense. Because the people he encounters “see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination,” he is effectively invisible.

He leaves the South for New York City, but his encounters continue to disgust him. Ultimately, he retreats to a hole in the ground, which he furnishes and makes his home. There, brilliantly illuminated by stolen electricity, he can seek his identity; as he says, “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”

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Analysis

The invisibility of Ellison’s protagonist is about the invisibility of identity—above all, what it means to be a Black man—and its various masks, confronting both personal experience and the force of social illusions. Invisible Man’s special quality is its deft combination of existential inquiry into identity as such—what it means to be socially or racially invisible—with a more sociopolitical allegory of the history of the African American experience in America. The first-person narrator remains nameless, retrospectively recounting his shifts through the surreal reality of surroundings and people from the racist South to the no less inhospitable world of New York City.

Invisible Man bears comparison with the existentialist novels of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus; the dehumanized narrator’s path toward alienation has points in common in particular with Camus’s early novels The Stranger and The Plague. It also maps out the story of one man’s identity against the struggles of collective self-definition. This takes the narrator-protagonist through the circumscribed social possibilities afforded to African Americans, from enslaved grandparents through Southern education, to models associated with Booker T. Washington, through to the full range of Harlem politics. Ellison’s almost sociological clarity in the way he shows his central character working through these possibilities is skillfully worked into a novel about particular people, events, and situations, from the nightmare world of the ironically named Liberty Paints to the Marxist-Leninist machinations of the Brotherhood. In the process, Ellison offers sympathetic but severe critiques of the ideological resources of Black culture, such as religion and music.

Fierce, defiant, and utterly funny, Ellison’s tone mixes various idioms and registers to produce an impassioned inquiry into the politics of being.