Product Description

Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952.  A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century.  The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.  The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1606 in Books
• Published on: 1995-03-14
• Released on: 1995-03-14
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 608 pages

Amazon.com
We rely, in this world, on the visual aspects of humanity as a means of learning who we are. This, Ralph Ellison argues convincingly, is a dangerous habit. A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952, Invisible Man chronicles the travels of its narrator, a young, nameless black man, as he moves through the hellish levels of American intolerance and cultural blindness. Searching for a context in which to know himself, he exists in a very peculiar state. "I am an invisible man," he says in his prologue. "When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me." But this is hard-won self-knowledge, earned over the course of many years.

As the book gets started, the narrator is expelled from his Southern Negro college for inadvertently showing a white trustee the reality of black life in the south, including an incestuous farmer and a rural whorehouse. The college director chastises him: "Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie! What kind of an education are you getting around here?" Mystified, the narrator moves north to New York City, where the truth, at least as he perceives it, is dealt another blow when he learns that his former headmaster's recommendation letters are, in fact, letters of condemnation.

What ensues is a search for what truth actually is, which proves to be supremely elusive. The narrator becomes a spokesman for a mixed-race band of social activists called "The Brotherhood" and believes he is fighting for equality. Once again, he realizes he's been duped into believing what he thought was the truth, when in fact it is only another variation. Of the Brothers, he eventually discerns: "They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves.... Here I thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either color or men."

Invisible Man is certainly a book about race in America, and sadly enough, few of the problems it chronicles have disappeared even now. But Ellison's first novel transcends such a narrow definition. It's also a book about the human race stumbling down the path to identity, challenged and successful to varying degrees. None of us can ever be sure of the truth beyond ourselves, and possibly not even there. The world is a tricky place, and no one knows this better than the invisible man, who leaves us with these chilling, provocative words: "And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" --Melanie Rehak

From Publishers Weekly
These three volumes have been redesigned and reissued to commemorate the first anniversary of Ellison's death.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Wright Morris
Invisible Man belongs on the shelf with the classical efforts man has made to chart the river Lethe from its mouth to its source.

Customer Reviews

Quiet Rage Turned into High Art
This novel, a model of creative writing, describes what it is like to land in a big city and then be sucked up into the black hole of urban life in America. It is a story told by a black man coming of age in the mid-1940s, and thus is about black anonymity in a white world. But one of the primary strengths of the novel is that its "meta-messages" are all about anonymity and thus makes it universal and applicable equally to any race and even to any urban culture.

It is existential in the sense that it is as much about cultural alienation in a modern world as it is about how to confront the barbaric social rules of a racist American culture. However, race is only one of the many themes in a subtext rich and textured with many sub-themes. Fear, distrust, betrayal, treachery, coming of age, and being invisible in plan sight, are just some of the other themes that run on parallel tracks in the subtext.

The story itself is a rather complex, if not altogether tortuous and improbable plot, betraying an otherwise cleanly written and logical structure. It seems to have been "jerry-rigged" to assist in the convergence of, and the resolution of, the many disparate threads and themes. That he pulled them all together in the end is itself no small technical feat, and probably accounts for the books inordinate length.

The author speaks in the (invisible) voice of the first person, leaving as few emotional clues as possible -- under the set of literary and emotional rules that he operates under and exploits. Other reviewers have compared his use of these devices to those used by Dostoyevski in his "Notes From the Underground," which is one of my favorite novels, and although I cannot disagree with these reviewers interpretations, I prefer to compare them with those used in Kafka's "The Trial." I believe the tensions created, and the way the novel is finally resolved, as well as the way he exploits the idea of being constantly controlled by larger forces, are equally palpable in both novels.

As for the issue of race, the highest marks must be given to Ellison both for his craft and for his artistic temperament, for not succumbing to a direct attack on American racism, using instead an oblique attack. Not that a direct attack was not a requirement of the times, but that it would have been viewed as being too angry, or too bitter. Quiet, sublimated rage worked much better, and as an unintended bonus, successfully linked all of the sub-themes up into another orbit of humanity. This was all to the good.

Among other things, this novel proves that good writing calls on all of one's inner strengths resources, as well as on ones talents.

Five stars.

The Search for Human Identity
Many reviewers found the main theme in the book to be about race relations, and in particular, about black identity in a white world. I don't entirely agree with this take on the book - at least not for the book as a whole. Some reviewers group this book in with a genre of "African American Literature". Sure, one can conclude this because the protagonist is black, but I think it belongs in the realm of "classic literature" without the African-American qualifier. I think so because though the protagonist is black, not all his experiences are uniquely experiences of a man as a black man but rather as a man dealing with other people regardless of his and their race.

The book starts out as some of the other reviewers have stated. The narrator does ponder what his role as a black man is in a "white" world, but really this happens primarily when he is in college and in his first few months in New York. He feels invisible because he feels people only see him as a black man and not as a man period (his humanity is unseen). The narrator feels others, both black and white, have defined who he is and who he should be based on the factor of race alone.

After his experience with the Brotherhood, however, you realize his central driving concern has transformed from: "Why do people (black and white) try to box me into their definition of what it means to be a black man?" to "Why don't they see me as an individual with my own value based not on their preconceived notions of who I am but by the quality of my own beliefs, my own intellect, and my own actions?".

The narrator joins the Brotherhood (a Communist group that has both black and white members) because that group, he believes, does not define him as a black man but as a "man". It turns out to be true that the Brotherhood, as a group, does not see him as a black man per se, but they know that others (in Harlem) do, and so he discovers that to the Brotherhood he is a tool to advance their communist agenda in Harlem (they pick him because they know no black person in Harlem would ever buy anything a white man has to say about "progress"). To the Brotherhood, the narrator does not have an identity as an individual but rather is a cog in a machine. So where he is invisible to people outside the Brotherhood who only see him as a black man, his individuality disappears altogether inside the Brotherhood and so becomes invisible to them as well.

The reason the book is not about a black man's struggle against the white man is that there is a character in the book whose central role is just this and our narrator gets in two vicious battles with this man. The man is Ras the Exhorter/Ras the Destroyer. His is a world of white oppression against the black man. This man thinks that black men in the Brotherhood have sold out to their white oppressor. The narrator, as evidenced by the battles, disagrees.

I think the most pointed evidence of the narrator's search for human identity (not necessarily black identity) is when he delivers his first speech as a member of the Brotherhood. At this point, he misunderstands the underlying purpose of the Brotherhood and delivers a speech that meets with considerable disfavor from the Brotherhood members. They don't like his speech because in it the narrator says, rather evocatively, "... I feel, I feel suddenly that I have become more human..." Here the narrator expresses the affirmation of his individual humanity, not black, not white, not as part of a group, but as a man that is defined by what he believes. Why not black identity? Because throughout the book he gets into battles not just with Ras the Exhorter (who is black); but with Bledsoe from the college (who is black); and with Lucius Brockway from the paint factory (who is black) and with the black members of the Brotherhood. His battles with these other black men are not just physical or verbal; they are symbolic, as each of these men conceives his identity as that inextricably tied to his race. To Ras, the right black is to be just black; to Bledsoe, the right black is the conjured, helpless black; to Lucius Brockway the right black is the white man's black; and, to the black members of the Brotherhood, the right black is not to be black at all but to be "gray". The narrator wants his own definition of himself made by himself for himself.

There's so much more to this book than what I describe above. There are the supporting themes of awareness and blindness as well as despair and hope. There is his relationship with Mary, with his grandfather, and with Sybil. There is incredible pathos in his regard for his briefcase, again another symbol. Each serves as a microscope for us to see just who he is and give his spirit form. It is an incredible book, deserving of all the "hype".

Speaks Truth to Power!
He speaks truth to power, and when you speak truth, you are going to be despised.


One of my many favorite Ralph Ellison's truths:

"I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was more satisfied -- not even I. On the other hand, I've never been more loved and appreciated that when I tried to "justify" and affirm someone's misgtaken beliefs; or when I have tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear. In my presence they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security. But here was the rub: Too often, in order to justify them, I had to take myself by the throat and choke myself until my eyes bulged and my tongue hung out and wagged like the door of an empty house in a high wind. Oh, yes, it made them happy and it made me sick. I became ill of affirmation, of saying "yes" against the nay-saying of my stomach -- not to mention my brain."

Never truer words spoken. I feel ya Ralph. Preach brother Preach! Ashe' an Amen.

I highly recommend this book, that is, if you ain't scurrred of the truth.