Invisible Man
Place on List:
IV. Special Area: Literary
Social Criticism
1. Primary Texts: Narrative Prose
Ralph
Ellison. Invisible
Man.
Supporting References:
- Hart, James D. "Invisible Man." The Concise Oxford Companion to American Literature. : Oxford University Press, 1986. Oxford Reference. 2002. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
“Invisible Man, novel by Ralph Ellison, published in 1952. The nameless black narrator living in an underground “hole” in New York City, brilliantly lighted by electricity he taps from Monopolated Light and Power, is invisible because people with whom he comes in contact “see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination.” Such vision is illustrated by his reminiscences of the Kafkaesque pilgrimage he has made from his beginnings in the South. As a bright high-school student he is invited by his town's most important men to deliver an oration to them on the virtues of humility. Before he is allowed to speak he must watch ribald entertainment and is forced to join other “niggers” in a blindfold fistfight. When he finally delivers his speech he mistakenly speaks of “social equality” instead of “social responsibility” and has to apologize abjectly so as to retain his prize of a scholarship to a college for blacks. At the college he finds the head to be a tyrannical hypocrite in his treatment of the students and fawningly humble to the white community. Expelled from the college, he goes to New York and soon falls in with the ruthless Brother Jack, leader of the Communist Brotherhood, more concerned with party politics and an authoritarian platform than with true aid to blacks. He is equally disillusioned by Ras the Exhorter, a West Indian rabble-rousing street leader, basically a self-promoter, and the Rev. B.P. Rinehart, “spiritual technologist” and preacher and a petty criminal as well. His experiences are climaxed by a surrealistic view of a Harlem race riot and its arson and looting. From this he retreats to his hideaway hole, reflecting upon the dehumanization visited not only on blacks but on all modern men.”
- Callahan, John F. "Ellison, Ralph." The Oxford Companion to United States History. : Oxford University Press, 2001. Oxford Reference. 2004. Date Accessed 19 Aug. 2013
The article offers
an overview of Ellison and less a discussion on the above-cited
text.
“Ellison, Ralph (1914–1994),
novelist and essayist. Born in Oklahoma City, the grandson of slaves,
Ralph Waldo Ellison played trumpet as a youth and later studied
composition at Tuskegee Institution. In 1936, after his junior year
there, he moved to New
York City to study sculpture. A friendship with
Richard Wright
turned him to writing. From 1938 to World
War II he worked on the Works
Progress Administration's Federal Writers'
Project and contributed reviews, essays, and short fiction to New
Masses, The Negro Quarterly (which he edited for a time), and
other periodicals. After service in the Merchant Marine (1942–1945),
he held various jobs, including work as a freelance photographer.
After a brief first marriage, he married Fanny McConnell in 1946; for
more than forty years, they lived in Harlem.
“Ellison's novel Invisible Man
(1952) won the National Book Award and has since grown in critical
esteem and popularity. Displaying a mastery of language, symbolism,
and allegory, and a humane sensibility, it brilliantly probes the
African-American
experience and American racial dynamics. After a fellowship at the
American Academy in Rome (1955–1957), Ellison taught and lectured
at several institutions, including Bard College, Yale, and Harvard.
Excerpts from his unfinished second novel appeared in various
literary magazines in the 1960s, and a version was published
posthumously in 1999 as Juneteenth. Ellison's essays and
interviews appeared in Shadow and Act (1964), Going to
the Territory (1986), and the posthumous Collected Essays
(1995) and his short fiction in Flying Home and Other Stories
(1996).
“Stubbornly committed to a vision of
American life and culture rooted in complexity, diversity, and
possibility, Ellison criticized some African Americans' tendencies
to view their “relationship to American literature in a negative
way.” As a novelist, he said, he felt the same “personal
responsibility for democracy” that he found in “our classic
19th-century novels.” He received the Presidential Medal of
Freedom in 1969.”
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