Invisible Man



Invisible Man

Critics generally agree that Ralph Ellison's award winning novel, Invisible Man, is a work of genius, broad in its appeal and universal in its meaning. Its various themes have been stated as: "the geography of hell . . . the real brotherhood of man" (Morris 5), the emergence of Negro personality from the "fixed boundaries of southern life" (Bone 46), and "the search for human and national identity" (Major 17). Rich in symbolism and cleverly interwoven, the product of seven years work, Invisible Man's linear plot structure, told from the first person, limited point of view, and framed by the Everyman protagonist from his subterranean home, follows the narrator in his search for identity in a color-conscious society whose constricting social and cultural bigotry produces an accelerated pattern of violence and oppression which attempts to efface the narrator of his individuality, thus assigning him an "invisible" non-identity within America.

The underlying force in Invisible Man is the atmosphere of America that begins in the early 1900's of the segregated deep south, and ends in the North's predominately black neighborhood of Harlem during the 1930's. As critic Marcus Klein states, "Everything in the novel has clarified this point: that the bizarre accident that has led [the Invisible Man] to take up residence in an abandoned coal cellar is no accident at all, that the underworld is his inevitable home, that given the social facts of America, both invisibility and what he calls his 'hibernation' are his permanent condition" (109).

Ellison's protagonist, the effaced narrator, is a young African-American male from the segregated deep south, who believes himself to be an "invisible man," a black man whose identity is, was and always will remain unseen and, therefore, unappreciated in American society unless something is done (3). Critic Todd Libber points out that invisibility results from a perception each society holds to be true. What does not fit into that idea of “reality” is therefore assigned to “chaos” and is invisible (90).

The rising action takes root at the time when, on his death bed, the narrator's grandfather reveals to the family that the life of a black person living in a foreign "white" America has always been and still is a life of war and opposition, and to keep up the fight. This puzzles the young impressionable narrator, for his grandfather has been "the meekest of men" who, as is further revealed, believes himself to have been "a traitor and a spy" all these years, and that his meekness has, in actuality, been "a dangerous activity." The tactics of "agree 'em to death" and "undermine 'em with grins" (15,16) are the tools that enable the Negro to survive, in essence agreeing to invisibility, until blindness strikes down white society (Margolies 135). Thus, Grandfather's words establish and foreshadow the cultural beliefs, such as racism and bigotry that the young narrator will encounter in a prejudicial society as he navigates his way through the social mine fields of ...