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581 pages 2nd edition
(March 1995)
Vintage Books;
ISBN: 0679732764
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
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