Historical Context
Slavery, Reconstruction and Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
The Civil War was fought to keep the United States together as a single nation.
While the Declaration of Independence asserted that it was
‘‘self-evident’’ that ‘‘all men were created equal,’’ the subsequent
formulation of the United States Constitution stipulated that slavery would
remain legal. Because of the plantation system, the Southern states' economic
livelihood depended on having a labor force which it could deny any legal,
social or human rights. In the decades before the Civil War, the United States
was held together through a series of compromises (The Missouri Compromise
(1820), The Fugitive Slave Act, Compromise of 1850, The Kansas-Nebraska Act
(1854)) that attempted to balance the political power of slave and free states.
One of the most blatant statements of deprivation of Blacks' basic rights of
citizenship and the attendant human rights was the Supreme Court's Dred
Scott decision of 1857, which stated directly that no black person had
rights any white man need respect. Under this ruling, no Black person was
allowed claims to citizenship.
The Civil War began in 1861 as the North tried to keep the South in the national Union. Slavery was partially abolished by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which did not outlaw slavery in the border states between North and South in an attempt to keep those states aligned neutral in the war. After the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment (ratified 1865) outlawed slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment (ratified 1868) guaranteed the rights of citizenship to freed Blacks. The Fifteenth Amendment (ratified 1870) guaranteed the right to vote. While these were important steps, they did not prevent the further oppression of African Americans.
Reconstruction was a federal policy to engineer the inclusion of freed African Americans into the national—political, economic and social—framework. In the 1870s, the North had grown weary of the enterprise and more concerned with facilitating industrial and corporate development. Prejudice against African Americans in the North severely limited their employment opportunities while local laws and social practices in the former slave states intimidated African Americans, and effectively locked them from participation in the marketplace. Local laws like the Black Codes and Jim Crow as well as brutal Ku Klux Klan violence effectively prevented many African Americans from voting, working or living where they would have chosen.
The presidential election of 1876 marks the unofficial termination of federal attempts to reconstruct the South. The election motivated a political compromise that installed the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, as president despite his failure to win a majority of electoral votes and his loss of the popular vote. The Democrats, who represented the interests of the former South, traded the presidency for assurances that under Hayes the last federal troops would be withdrawn from the South. Without the troops, the local governments in the South were able to follow with impunity programs of segregation and intimidation against African Americans. In 1896, the Supreme Court, in Plessy v. Ferguson, legally sanctioned separate Pullman cars for Blacks and whites, citing the segregation of public schools in Washington, D.C. as social precedent that demonstrated the social proclivity to segregate. The legal sanction of racial segregation structured the school system, employment opportunities and loan opportunities until Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas (1954), which ruled that segregationist policies were inherently unequal. Ellison's novel is published just two years before the Brown decision.
African American Resistance and Leadership: Booker T. Washington and W.
E. B. DuBois
In equating himself with his grandfather and with Booker T. Washington, the narrator recalls major figures who served to fight against...
(This entire section contains 1901 words.)
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the marginalization of African Americans, during and after the abolition of slavery. It is notable that the short story and the novel seem to use figures of men as leaders while women serve relatively minor roles. The narrator projects himself into a clearly empowered, masculine agency.
To understand the novel's irony regarding the narrator's reverence of Booker T. Washington, it is important to consider the context in which Washington became powerful. His autobiography, Up From Slavery, was published in 1901. It tells of his rise from his childhood status as a slave to being one of the most influential men of his time period. Following the legacy of Frederick Douglass, who in a previous generation had written of rising into social and political prominence after escaping slavery, Washington reached a wide audience with his message of African-American self-reliance and a seeming acceptance of the segregational boundaries in place throughout the United States. Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute, a school designed to educate African Americans in practical industries, vocations and trades. In speeches like the ‘‘Atlantic Compromise’’ that he delivered at the International Exposition in Georgia of 1895, he urged the uplift of African Americans while placating the white audience with a seeming endorsement of segregation. The narrator's speech echoes Wash-ington's words to African Americans, urging them not to migrate to cities and seek integration but instead to ‘‘cast down your bucket down where you are.’’
W. E. B. DuBois was an African-American leader and critic of Booker T. Washington. In The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois urged African Americans to become central to the functioning of the United States through an education that stressed intellectual achievement. He proposed that a sole focus on vocational training perpetuated the disen-franchisement of the Black community and that if the "talented-tenth" of African Americans were allowed to exercise their mental capacities, it would self-evidently demonstrated that African Americans were crucial components of the national body. DuBois and Washington openly criticized each other's leadership.
DuBois' idea of "double-consciousness" is central to Ellison's novel. DuBois writes in the first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk: "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.’’ DuBois' words seem particularly relevant to both the narrator and the grandfather's sense of divided identity.
The Philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson was a famous American philosopher of the nineteenth century. His 1836
book Nature became a pillar of transcendental philosophy, a belief in
the individual's fundamental agency in the world and potential to move beyond
historical circumstance and local environment to fundamentally influence the
world through the implementation of one's social vision. In according this
power to the individual, Emerson borrows and reformulates within the democratic
rhetoric of the United States the romantic energy espoused by the English
romantic poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth as well as the dynamic idealism of
Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. Emerson's essay provides memorable
quotations such as ‘‘Standing on bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air
and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a
transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal
Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.’’ Ellison's blindfolded
narrative "I" seems to comment ironically on Emerson's abstract and
transcendent individual.
Naming Racial CategoriesInvisible Man was published just before the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s began to gain momentum. In terminology used to name African Americans in the story, novel, reviews of the novel, and subsequent criticism, one can see the force of political and social conflict. When the novel was written, the popular press used the term Negro to name African Americans (see Irving Howe's review below). While intending a kind of respect, the term "Negro" is a clear enforcement of separate identity—a separation that included social, political and cultural implications but that was summed up in the simplistic description of one's skin color as black or "negro." The term "colored" also implied this difference. Although it was acceptable at the turn of the century (used to name the NAACP or National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), it developed a more pejorative sense in the 1950s, implying the segregationist practices of denying African Americans access to stores, lunch counters, and parks, as well as designating areas on buses or specific "colored'' drinking fountains, separate from "white fountains,'' where African Americans were forced to drink. In contemporary conversation, the terms 'colored' and 'Negro' are both offensive, reflecting the deep prejudice of our nation's history.
The term "nigger" was deeply offensive, as the story demonstrates, touching a sense of white racial superiority and violence that stretched back to the practice of slavery. There is no indication that "nigger" has ever been a commonly acceptable term, free of its offensive implication of subordination and threat of violence. Even when used casually in fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it implies a deeply held belief in white racial superiority and disrespect of people it serves to name. The terms "black" and "Black" in the United States became acceptable ways of referring to African Americans as the political force of the civil rights movement took hold. The Black Arts Movement in the 1960s is one example of the way in which African Americans used the term Black to symbolize a cultural and communitarian solidarity and power. While its capitalized form is accepted today, the word "Black" can imply a clearer demarcation between people than exists culturally or biologically. While the forces of racism and prejudice have often enforced severe lines of demarcation in the social world, the reality of people's lives is often difficult to consider through the binary categories of "Black" and "white."
This essay uses African American to describe the narrator and his class mates. African American or African-American reflects the political tension of being a citizen of an American national culture that relied on slavery for two-hundred and fifty years and that extended slavery's effects through legally sanctioned social policies after the Civil War. The term emphasizes the cultural history of being Black and having ancestral connection to Africa and its many cultures. The term "white" has been consistently acceptable, effectively naming a group of people with ostensibly various ethnic backgrounds. It is worth noting that no one's skin is literally white or Black, demonstrating that skin color is part of a system of representation, interpreted within social contexts. This strange consistency and effectiveness of the term "white'' in the United States indicates perhaps that "whiteness" is not merely or mainly about one's literal skin tone, but about social (political, economic and cultural) power in the United States. The mere adjective "white'' has seemed right for a long time, an often unnecessary descriptor of the "normal'' American. This normalization of "whiteness" might provide an ironic index of the extent to which African Americans have been historically disenfranchised.
Civil Rights
This story was re-published as the first chapter of Invisible Man in
1952. Ellison's novel elucidated the social anguish of a society predicated on
the social and legal principles of segregation in both the North and in the
South. Two years after the novel was published, the Supreme Court issued
Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, overturning Plessy
v.Ferguson (1896), and declaring that the idea of"separate but equal'' was
inherently flawed. Segregation produced inequality of resources and
opportunity. The Civil Rights movement in the South, led by religious leaders
like Martin Luther King, Jr., would strengthen to a point that could no longer
be ignored.
Literary Style
Point of View and Narration
The narration is in first person, addressing the reader directly with a direct
and honest tone implying a certain naiveté. The narrator is most capable of
conveying his confusion. His sense of accomplishment is rendered pathetic by
his constant inability to take offense at the inhumane treatment he endures at
the hands of his "benefactors." By rendering scenes of physical and
psychological violence to the reader in forceful detail and lyrical immediacy,
one expects a statement of anger and resistance. Instead, the reader alone
seems to understand the demeaning implication of the battle royal as the
narrator progresses toward the ultimately triumphant scholarship award. The
final mention of the narrator's dream suggests that this absence of indignation
is indeed ironic, an irony that is wound more tightly in the novel as a
whole.
Setting
The story takes place around eighty-five years after the Emancipation
Proclamation of 1863, in approximately 1947. It is important that the narrator
lives in the South, where slavery played a crucial role in sustaining the
economic system of plantation farming until the Civil War. In the days after
slavery's abolition, African Americans were prevented from becoming
economically stable by the white community. The town of the story reflects a
fundamental hierarchy in which white men are those with economic, political,
judicial and educational authority. The hotel where the battle royal takes
place represents the extent of this white power. It is significant that once
inside the room where the events take place, one is either there as an audience
member or an entertainer. The audience is composed only of white men being
entertained by their perverse manipulation of the young African-American men
and the "magnificent blonde'' stripper.
Symbol and Images
The narrator's direct statement of the scene seems too simplistic given the
frenzied events unfolding and the immediate impact of these events on the
narrator himself. This incongruity invites the reader to see in these discrete
images a broader significance, reaching to comment on the more general social
dynamic that produces the story's violence.
The image of the circus occurs at the beginning and ending of the story. The
grandfather urges the narrator to live his life with his head in the lion's
mouth, and in the narrator's final dream he sits next to
his grandfather at a circus. These images might symbolize the fundamental
uncertainty of life. Whereas the conventional ideas of respectably working,
earning and raising a family imply a clear logic, the circus is a spectacle
that makes everything both funny and unpredictable. The circus is also a place
of masquerade and of power reversals, where clowns enact skits that make those
who are supposed to be in charge appear foolish. The circus is also a place
that uses the illusion of danger—lions, canons, the tightrope—to dramatic
effect. By equating life with a circus, the narrator's dreams seem to enforce
the irony of his aspiration to be a respectable figure like Booker T.
Washington.
The fight is a central symbol, representing the harsh reality of the marketplace for African Americans. The physical brutality reflects the reality of violence directed against Black men by white society in the North and the South. The scene of the schoolmates being confronted by the stripper represents the ways in which racism against African Americans was expressed sexually. The white, male audience's lurid interest in watching both the stripper and the young men's terrified reaction to her naked body are poignant and disturbing expressions of how deeply oppressive racism can be.
Structure
The story is presented as a retrospective, told from an unknown vantage point
in the present, well after the narrated events have concluded. From this
vantage point, the narrator remembers his life before he left for college in
which two specific events occurred: the death of his grandfather and his
participation in the battle royal. This reminiscence incorporates an historical
depth by using the grandfather's life to reach back eighty-five years, thus
connecting the narrated events to a national history of slavery's abolition and
the eventual abandonment of Reconstruction. The reminiscence also suggests that
the narrator may have grown into a more accurate understanding of these past
events.
Compare and Contrast
1952: Racial segregation is legal, upheld by the Supreme Court decision of 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson. Schools, housing and employment and businesses in the South maintain separate facilities for Black and white people.
1954: The Supreme Court reverses the Plessy v. Ferguson decision with the decision, Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas. Declaring that separate facilities are inherently unequal, the court ordered the desegregation of schools throughout the country.
2000: Today, de facto segregation continues to frustrate the implementation of the court's 1954 decision.
1860: About forty percent of African Americansliving in the city of New York would have to move in order to achieve racial integration. In New Orleans, about thirty-six percent of African Americans would have to move. (Massey and Denton)
1940: About eighty-seven percent of African Americans living in the city of New York would have to move in order to achieve racial integration. In New Orleans, about eighty-one percent of African Americans would have to move.
1990: About eighty-two percent of African Americans living in the city of New York would have to move to achieve racial integration. In New Orleans, about sixty-nine percent of African Americans would have to move.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Sources
Baumbach, Jonathan, ‘‘Nightmare of a Native Son: Ralph Ellison's Invisible
Man,’’ in Critique, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring, 1963, 48-65.
Bellow, Saul, ‘‘Man Underground: Review of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man’’ in Commentary, June, 1952, pp. 608-610.
Busby, Marle, Ralph Ellison, Twayne, 1991.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, "Nature," in Selected Essays, edited by Larzer Ziff, Penguin, 1985, pp. 35-82.
German, Norman, ‘‘Imagery in the ‘‘Battle Royal’’ Chapter of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man,’’ in CLA Journal, Vol. 21, No. 4, June, 1988, pp. 394-399.
Hoberek, Andrew, "Race Man, Organization Man, Invisible Man,’’ in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 59, No. 1, March, 1998, pp. 99-119.
Holland, Laurence B., "Ellison in Black and White: Confession, Violence and Rhetoric in Invisible Man,’’ in Black Fiction: New Studies in the Afro-American Novel Since 1945, edited by A. Robert Lee, Barnes and Noble Books, 1980, pp. 54-73.
Howe, Irving, "Review of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man,’’ in the Nation, May 10, 1952.
Kim, Daniel Y., ‘‘Invisible Desires: Homoerotic Racism and its Homophobic Critique in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man,’’ in Novel, Vol. 30, No. 3, Spring, 1997, pp. 309-328.
Lee, Kun Jong, ‘‘Ellison's Invisible Man: Emersonianism Revised,’’ in PMLA, Vol. 107, No. 2, March, 1992, pp. 331-344.
Lyne, William, ‘‘The Signifying Modernist: Ralph Ellison and the Limits of the Double Consiousness,’’ in PMLA, Vol. 107, No. 2, March, 1992, pp. 310-330.
Massey, Douglas S. and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, Harvard University Press, 1994.
Morris, Wright, New York Times, April 13, 1952.
Neal, Larry, Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings, edited by Michael Schwartz, Thunder's Mouth, 1989. O'Meally, Robert, ed., New Essays on ‘‘Invisible Man,’’ Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Parr, Susan Resneck and Pancho Savery, eds., Approaches to Teaching Ellison's "Invisible Man,'' The Modern Language Association, 1989.
Sundquist, Eric J., ed., Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison's ‘‘Invisible Man’’: A Bedford Documentary Companion, St. Martin's Press, 1995.
Further Reading
Branch, Taylor, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63,
Simon and Schuster, 1988. This Pulitzer Prize-winning history narrates the
intensification of civil rights initiatives and the advent of a national
movement that spanned across the North and South.
Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man, Random House, 1952. The complete novel develops themes laid out in the short story. The plot follows the narrator to college and then to New York City where much of the novel takes place.
Kozol, Jonathan, Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools, HarperPerennial, 1991. This book offers accounts of the state of public education in the United States, demonstrating that racial segregation has endured since 1954, perpetuating inequalities in social and economic opportunity. The book blends insightful interviews of teachers and students with analysis of the current logic behind public policy.
Sundquist, Eric J., ed., Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison's ‘‘Invisible Man’’: A Bedford Documentary Companion, St. Martin's Press, 1995. This book offers fabulous excerpts from a wide range of documents, including Supreme Court decisions, literary essays, historical considerations and political essays. Serves to orient the novel in regard to the historical, political and social context in which it was written, published, and read.