What is the significance of blues and jazz in Invisible Man?
Jazz and blues are musical genres that are dominated by African American artists, which is what makes this music a particularly appropriate symbol in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
Ellison’s narrator is fixated on jazz, particularly that of Louis Armstrong. He and other African American musicians reinvented jazz and made it a form that was extremely popular with the dominant white culture. The narrator realizes, however, that these artists experience the same “invisibility” he does:
I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing "What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue"—all at the same time… Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he's made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he's unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music.
It was a common practice that entertainers of color were not...
Unlock This Answer Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
allowed to fully integrate. They were allowed to entertain, but they remained segregated, forced to stay at different hotels than the ones they played in and not welcome to socialize with the white employers and entertainers. They were never fully seen as part of society.
Jazz became a music of protest, in its format as well as its subject matter. While other musical genres maintain a steady rhythm, jazz uses swing and syncopation to create its signature sound. Swing is the effect that is created when performers play with the beat but sometimes speed up and sometimes fall behind. Syncopation is when emphasis appears in an unexpected place, such as a downbeat or entirely off the beat. Another element that makes jazz unique is a soloist’s improvisation, which is more free in jazz than in other musical genres. In fact, Louis Armstrong played a major role in the development of “scatting,” or vocal improvisation with wordless syllables instead of words.
Jazz's rebellion against musical convention in this way helped establish it as the music of African American rebellion. It is appropriate, then, that it is a symbol of rebellion in The Invisible Man, a novel that protests racism.
How does the sub-theme of jazz incorporate itself into Invisible Man?
In Invisible Man, music is a recurring motif. Jazz and the blues, more specifically, relate to the writing style and mood of the novel respectively. Himself a jazz musician, Ellison has said:
The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.
The novel begins with lyrics from Jazz great Louis Armstrong's song which says, "What did I do to be so black and blue?" In chapter 1, a jazz clarinet plays for the cupie doll white woman in the ring. In chapter 2, it's "London Bridge Blues." In chapter 4, there's "Live a Humble." In chapter 6, there's a blues guitar and piano harmonizing. And so on...
So the blues and jazz are intwined because they are the two greatest African-American art forms. The blues is an emblem of suffering and jazz is a creative impulse; together, they achieve a duality of the Black experience.
Stylistically, the novel is written with a jazz feel of stream-of-consciousness, part of the "Keep that ... boy running" mantra that is echoed in the first chapter. Ellison's pace feels furious, then languid, then furious again. It's all part of an improvisational and existential look at race and identity. Characters, motifs, and themes appear, disappear, and then reappear in the novel like a riff in a sax or piano solo.