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Invisible Man | Introduction

At its appearance in 1952, Invisible Man was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. A work both epic and richly comic, it won the National Book Award for its author, Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man has been translated into fourteen languages and has never been out of print. A 1965 Book Week poll of two hundred writers and critics selected it as the most distinguished novel of the previous twenty years. Written in the style of a bildungsroman, or novel of education, the book chronicles the sometimes absurd adventures of a young black man whose successful search for identity ends with the realization that he is invisible to the white world. Invisible Man is structurally complex and densely symbolic; some critics, in fact, faulted it for what they saw as literary excess. A major controversy centered on the book's intended audience: some black critics argued that it was or should have been a ‘‘race’’ novel, while white critics were relieved that it was not. It also aroused the ire of black nationalists for sacrificing the broader concerns of black nationhood in the defense of a narrow individualism. This contentiousness dissipated over time, however, and the novel's enduring qualities are now undisputed. Invisible Man deals with themes of individuality, identity, history, and responsibility. The protagonist is repeatedly exhorted to look beneath the surface of things. Although Ellison freely acknowledged his debt to both European and African American literary traditions, he used an astonishing range of African-American folk forms in constructing his protagonist's universe. Critics agree that the influence of Invisible Man on American literature in general, and its role in bringing the blues and folklore into the mainstream of black experience in particular, is incalculable.

Invisible Man Summary

Prologue
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man chronicles the life of an unnamed, first-person narrator from his youth in the segregated American South of the 1920s to a temporary ‘‘hibernation,’’ twenty years later, in a ‘‘border area’’ of Harlem. From his ‘‘hole in the ground,’’ this invisible man responds to his ‘‘compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white’’ by telling his story. He begins by attempting to explain his own invisibility: ‘‘I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.’’ The tendency of others to distort what they see or to see ‘‘everything and anything’’ except him leads the narrator to question his own existence. As a result, he feels resentment toward those who refuse to acknowledge his reality. When he bumps into one such person on the street, the narrator responds to the man's slurs with swift violence. He is kept from killing him only by the unnerving realization that his victim did not, in fact, see him as another human being but rather as a ‘‘phantom’’ or a mirage. The narrator notes one curious advantage of invisibility, a ‘‘slightly different sense of time’’ that allows one to ‘‘see around corners.’’ After accidentally smoking a "reefer’’ and experiencing a hallucinogenic journey back through history to slave times, the narrator recognizes that his awareness of invisibility alone gives him a more useful sense of sight. He has, as he puts it, ‘‘illuminated the blackness of my invisibility,’’ and it remains for him to explain, in the rest of the novel, what has brought him to this newfound understanding of his own identity and of his role in American society.

Chapters 1-6
The narrator begins his story with his memories of youth and adolescence in a small southern town. He recalls first, as the most baffling but powerful memory of his childhood, the final instructions of his dying grandfather that he must live as a ‘‘traitor’’ and ‘‘a spy in the enemy's territory.’’ These words become ‘‘like a curse’’ to the narrator as he grows older, for he finds reward in living a life of outward humility and he doesn't understand how such a life might be called ‘‘treachery.’’ Asked by the leading white citizens of the town to repeat his graduation speech extolling submissiveness, the narrator finds himself required to participate in a battle royal, a blindfolded boxing match with one of his schoolmates. Bloodied from the fight and humiliated by the racist jeers of the white men, the narrator still delivers his speech about ‘‘social responsibility’’ and receives, as a ‘‘badge of office,’’ a brief case and a college scholarship.

The narrator's education at the ‘‘state college for Negroes’’ comes to an abrupt end during his junior year, when he shows a wealthy white benefactor of the college, Mr. Norton, parts of the South that the college wishes to hide from its northern visitors. Mr. Norton is horrified by what he hears from Jim Trueblood (a black sharecropper who has impregnated his own daughter) and by what he sees in the... » Complete Invisible Man Summary