Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
on’t confuse this book with the 1897 volume of a similar title
(The Invisible Man) by H. G. Wells. Wells’s character Griffin
became literally invisible. The protagonist of Ellison’s uneven
but fascinating novel is only metaphorically invisible, but he’s also
anonymous. Even when he takes on an assumed name at one point,
the reader remains ignorant of that new name as well. Let’s call him
The Narrator. The character, like his creator, is African American. The
novel, while addressing issues of racial prejudice and racial identity,
transcends limited categorization to become a novel about the difficulty of being an individual. It’s not surprising to learn that Oklahomaborn Ralph Waldo Ellison was named for the nineteenth-century New
England essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, for the need for self-reliance
(one of Emerson’s most important themes) resounds throughout the
novel.
The structure of the novel is cyclical. It opens with The Narrator in
an underground hideout in Harlem. (Another clear literary ancestor is
Dostoyevsky’s similarly unnamed hero of Notes from the Underground
who has rejected the limits of rationalism and terms himself “spiteful”
and “unpleasant.”) The cave of the comparatively good-natured Narrator has a manhole cover for a mouth, and he lights this space with more
than one thousand lightbulbs with power drained off from Monopolated Light & Power. He’s not buried, for he assures us he will come
forth in the proper season. Like the more traditional ursine inhabitant
of a wintry cave, The Narrator sees himself as in hibernation. He will
come forth, but meanwhile he listens to Louis Armstrong’s recording
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March