Invisible Man

"Its exploration of societal invisibility and psychological horror fits Stephen King's interest in the unseen terrors lurking beneath everyday life."

"Until his posthumously published novels, Invisible Man was Ellison’s only novel in print. But if one could only publish one book, Invisible Man would be the one. It engages a number of literary traditions—the high modernism of Joyce , Eliot and Pound, but also Dostoevsky and Marx . It’s filled with allusions to African American folklore, folk culture and history. It’s just a rich and dynamic novel. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Invisible Man is epic in scope; appropriately, there are also allusions to Homer. It’s a great quest narrative. A young black, middle-class, intellectual protagonist navigates his way from a Tuskegee-like institution in the South through Harlem, confronting Garveyism and the Communist Party. It’s an incredibly ambitious novel, which was recognized as a tour de force from the instant of its publication, Ellison wrote himself into canon. He was very hard to ignore, but for a while, he was treated as the only one. He probably did open a door by showing that one did not only have to write in social realism, one did not only have to write what is known as protest fiction. He showed that there was room for high modernist experimentation in African American literature. We wouldn’t have had a literary establishment ready for Morrison without Ellison."

"Invisible Man is concerned with a particular version of the object-subject relation which dominates all of the works on my list. According to a tradition in Western philosophy going back to Hegel , I become a subject by identifying with the object you see me as. If I grow up in a world where everyone sees me as smart, beautiful, admirable, I will form a certain conception of myself, and understand my agency in certain ways. If I grow up despised and hated, I’ll form a correspondingly different self-image. But what if everyone I encounter simply fails to see me? Perhaps I’m not literally invisible, but invisible in the sense that people project categories onto me that feel so alien to my experience and actions that I can’t possibly identify with them. For Ellison, American racism creates a condition in which the black person is unrecognizable in this sense. Using the resources of dark comedy—especially in the incredible Trueblood and Battle Royale sequences—Ellison describes the mingled, ambiguous fusion of subjection and power, imprisonment and freedom, that comprise the black condition in midcentury America. I think of Ice and Invisible Man as the two great works of midcentury modernism that most powerfully—and subtly—explore the difference race and gender make to modernism’s key themes."

"A round-about way of answering this: I sometimes talk to the students I teach about the fallacy of the term ‘Great American Novel’ because it presumes a quality that is arguably at odds with the actual nation itself. A Great American Novel presupposes the experiences of a manageably unified nation, which is, of course, not the story of America. It’s maybe the dream of America, though, which is why some of my favorite American novels, like Invisible Man , have a distinctly dreamlike quality. I do think that you could perhaps call Invisible Man the most characteristic American novel, in that it so thoroughly acknowledges this struggle and embraces it in its form. I also don’t think of Invisible Man as existing purely in a textual sphere. I’ve always felt that it lies at the intersection of a number of different arts – painting, music, sculpture – and that it alternately mimics or incorporates their forms as it goes; I would use the word ‘artwork’ rather than novel. At the centre of the novel is this image of the narrator’s racial visibility that deliberately doesn’t cohere into a systematic idea: when he’s invisible he’s visible, and when he’s visible he’s invisible. For the entire novel, he’s in this spectral state, flickering between these different modes of being, always at the whim of other people. The only solution is either to turn the lights out, or to turn all the lights permanently on. It’s an extraordinarily powerful metaphor, and it never gets overworked because Ellison heightens everything almost to the level of myth, so all moments in the narrator’s journey become these tableaux or overdetermined objects of injustice. It’s an incredible novel."

"I want to help open up the category of environment widely—to let in people who have traditionally been excluded from mainstream environmentalism, and in the US this exclusion has almost always targeted people of colour. Ralph Ellison’s novel is the story of an unnamed narrator, set, initially, in the rural South. He works his way up to a prestigious black college, journeys north, works in factories and, at the conclusion of the novel, ends up living underground in a space lit by 1,369 lightbulbs. Part of what makes this radically environmental, I think, is that the book traces his movement through spaces and landscapes of exploitation—whether it’s the Southern sharecropping landscape, or the Northern industrial factory one. The book charts the way that an individual person interacts with landscapes, economies, cultures—with different environments. What the novel pinpoints relentlessly, and I should say beautifully, is the environment of exploitation, whether southern and agrarian or northern and industrial. There’s no purity in any of these landscapes. The narrator is constantly trying to overcome exploitation, whether by the traditional route of pulling himself up by the bootstraps or, later in the novel when he joins a Marxist cell. But he can’t. He fails, or rather, every system fails him. This is a deeply pessimistic novel, with no resolution or clear path forward—and yet, it’s a novel with great resolve. There’s a great line near the end of the novel where the narrator says: “Life is to be lived, not controlled. And humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.” “Humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat” This, to me, really resonates with the scientist and environmentalist Rachel Carson, who entitled one of the chapters of Silent Spring , ‘The Obligation to Endure.’ Isn’t that what Ellison is writing about? What a bracing, defiant, radical environmental ethic: “Life is to be lived, not controlled. And humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.”"

"When I was working on Annotated African American Folktales , with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., I spent a year as a Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. It was almost like signing up for a fast-tracked degree in African American studies. I reread Invisible Man and realized that Ralph Ellison, who saw himself as writing in the Anglo-American and European literary tradition, took much from African American folklore. And that’s when Invisible Man began to hiss and crackle for me, throwing sparks in many different directions. Invisible Man begins underground. The protagonist is diverting electricity from the grid to a hidden, subterranean space, luminous with purloined energy. Ellison is using the technique of what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., calls, “the talking book,” communicating to us the protagonist’s experience of dislocation and alienation. Invisible Man is a work that is nearly seventy years old, but it resonates powerfully with us today, with all that has emerged in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. Just a few days ago, I was part of an interview team for a post-doc program at Harvard. One of the applicants described how Invisible Man had led him to the study of literature. Ellison had done what Shakespeare had not been able to do for him. Here was a character with whom he could identify, a character who was “relatable,” as he put it, with a rich interior life that corresponded in symbolic terms to what he, as an African American man, had experienced. Sometimes books act like mirrors for us (putting us into the funhouse, with all its zany distortions), but sometimes they can function as windows into other worlds or doors into someplace else. We use all those figures of speech to understand the reading experience. For me, reading Invisible Man meant crossing a threshold and witnessing something that was unfamiliar, strange, and, yes, we are back to “disorienting”. Things that had once been imperceptible and faint to me suddenly became legible, with a clarity and precision I could not have imagined on my own."

"I'd have to say "Invisible Man," by Ralph Ellison, influenced my decision because I wanted to be seen and wanted people to hear the truth from someone who looks like me."

"I wrote a general exam on Ellison's "Invisible Man" and the French theorist Michel de Certeau."

"I read "Song of Solomon" and "Invisible Man" in succession when I was a high school junior. Both of those novels opened me up to the possibilities of what a novel might do."

"The first book of real importance from my reading list in high school and which made an impression on me that causes me still to question, to look deeper, to take nothing and no one at face value."

"Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man." It's a book about what happens when the society is so chaotic that it leaves no room for the individual to change or grow."

"hearing Joe Morton's stupendous performance was like encountering the novel for the first time, again. The Morton version is absolutely riveting."