Invisible Man

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What can I say about a book that may just be The Great American Novel? It’s extraordinarily well written. It’s sometimes hilariously funny and sometimes tragically sad. It’s filled with vivid images and much symbolism. It addresses a subject central to American history, social life, and customs - the place of the Negro in American life.

Ralph Waldo Ellison is an interesting man. As you could guess from his name, his parents were among those in the early 20th century who felt that the future of American Negroes depended on self reliance. Ellison won a full scholarship to the Tuskegee Institute to study music, where he would have been under the influence of Booker T Washington, Tuskegee’s founder, who was a proponent of Negro self-reliance. Ellison was a perfectionist and spent the rest of his life writing another novel which he never considered sufficiently finished to publish.

By the time he wrote Invisible Man Ellison adhered to the ideas of W E B Du Bois, who disparaged Washington’s theory that Negroes had to work their way into American society slowly, temporarily accept Jim Crow separation of the races, and learn to be more effective and efficient domestic servants, mechanics, and carpenters. Du Bois was a proponent of the “talented tenth” philosophy which demanded immediate civil rights for those few highly educated Negroes, like himself, who wanted to take their places as equals to similarly educated white people where they would work for the progress of their race.

Ellison was a communist for a time and Invisible Man stands with Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon as a novel of disillusionment with communism. The novel features a number of characters who are identifiable, such as Marcus Garvey, Sweet Daddy Grace, Washington, and his successor, Robert Mussa Moton.

Invisible Man has a busy plot with the narrator (whose name changes during the course of the story but is never revealed to the reader) leaving a southern school clearly meant to be Tuskegee and attempting to make a living in New York City. He works at a paint factory, is kept in a mental hospital, is a community organizer for the communists, and finally recognizes his disillusionment as Harlem burns down around him in a riot exacerbated by the communists.

2011 No 77 Coming soon: Popular Crime, by Bill James

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