★★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: Invisible Man
• Author: Ralph Ellison
• Year: 1952 (mine was 2018 special edition)
• Pages: 439*
• Genre: Fiction
• Publisher: Random House
• ISBN 978-0-3853-6598-7 (leatherbound special edition)
• Wikipedia Page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

(* The 439 pages refers only to the text of Invisible Man; the edition I bought also contains Juneteenth for a total of 800+ pages.)

 

Summary

Winner of the 1953 National Book Award for Fiction and ranked number 19 on Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels (just behind Slaughterhouse-Five), Ellison’s Invisible Man has been called “a masterpiece” and “superb” by top critics. My copy was a beautiful, sturdily bound special edition hardcover from Barnes & Noble — an edition that also contains Ellison’s posthumous novel Juneteenth.

The story is told by an anonymous first-person narrator who often doesn’t understand the significance of the events he describes. No dates are listed, but the first chapter uses “eighty-five years ago” to refer to the end of slavery, which would mean 1950, but then also says (in the very first sentence): “It goes a long way back, some twenty years”, which places the beginning of the story’s events in 1930. The narrator does well in high school and is well-liked by “the most lily-white men of the town”, then is awarded a scholarship to the “state college for Negroes”. There, an experience with a white donor to the school gets him kicked out and he goes to New York City looking for work. The story rambles from one experience to the next, getting hired and then injured at a paint factory, experimental medical treatment, and finally beginning work for “the Brotherhood”, which seems to be a white-run social justice organization interested in progressive changes to society. The narrator is hired as an organizer and speech-maker, though in the end he feels betrayed by the organization. Aside from the first chapter, no dates are mentioned and the narrator rarely mentions how much time has passed (and sometimes admits he doesn’t know how much time has passed), but the later events of the novel seem to take place in the mid- to late 1930s. (The narrator mentions zoot suits several times, placing the events in the late 1930s or early 1940s, but no world war is mentioned so I have assumed late 1930s.)

 

Praise

Some of what I liked about the novel can’t be credited to Ellison. For example, the descriptions of his friend Clifton being shot dead by a police officer, the resulting community protests demanding the officer be fired, the political nature of the funeral, and the resulting riots — all of this sounded like it was written this year — because so little has changed, not because Ellison was a prophet.

But some of what I liked about it is due to Ellison. The way he describes people, places, and events was often engaging, clear, and very often humorous. For example, he described a prostitute as “belching elegantly” (page 71), two words I never expected to sit next to one another. The story moves along nicely and the prose isn’t difficult to read.

Most of the undercurrent of the novel is about the narrator’s own struggle to perceive himself, to place himself in his proper niche while constantly finding contradictions. This part, I identified with strongly (not with the being Black part, obviously, but the struggle to define myself in relation to the world and its perceptions of me). The narrator is a Black man, but does not see himself in the same light as other Black men around him. He also craves yet despises attention and praise from white men, hates to be controlled by them but continues seeking them for advice and employment.

 

Points Off For...

In places, Ellison seemed to forget what kind of novel he was writing and went on at length irrelevantly. For example, he recounts for twelve pages a speech by Rev. Homer A. Barbee (a name we don’t learn until halfway through the speech), none of which has any bearing on the narrative in this book.

There were also many places where Ellison simply wouldn’t say what he was trying to say and the reader has to guess what has happened. In other places, I think the meaning might have been obscured by the slang of the times.

Weirdly, many negative reviews I saw about this novel focused on two things I did not find here. They claim either (1) it was boring, plodding, repetitive, or (2) “all the characters are archetypes”. I found neither to be true. Almost none of the characters were archetypes, which was actually sometimes annoying — we readers often depend on archetypes for quick understanding of what a character is like. Instead I found most characters in this book unfamiliar, peculiar, and contradictory, difficult to pigeon-hole. As for plodding, no this book is not that. Not in the same way War And Peace is, for sure. Boring is perhaps a matter of taste, but repetitive is something that’s countable; I found very little here that I could describe as “repetitive”. Each scene moves the story along to a new place, introduces new characters, or performs new actions. Perhaps the one thread that seemed repetitive is the narrator’s continual inability to figure out his place in life.

My primary complaint has to be the illusory, vague, ungraspable nature of the plot itself, which seems to just move from one situation to the next without common threads or storyline. Even the ending is disappointing, when the story doesn’t really end but rather simply fades away.

And — please don’t hate me for this — I never understood the title’s relation to the narrative. The first lines of the prologue explain that the narrator is “invisible”, not because he’s a ghost or unseeable in some other way, but “because people refuse to see me” At that point, I thought I was understanding it, and he further explained that he sometimes doubts if he really exists — something I’ve often wondered too. But then the book starts and it’s filled with stories of people actually seeing him, constantly, interacting with him, alternatively helping him or using him, some of them understanding him better than he understands himself. The only place in the entire book that I felt referenced the “invisible” part was very late, when the narrator dons a hat and sunglasses and people on the streets mistake him for someone else.

 

Interesting Quotations

Following a few quotations that stood out to me, for various reasons.

“I felt a shudder of nameless horror. I had never been so close to a white person before.”

—page 66

“For we are a young, though a fast-rising, people. Legends are still to be created.”

—page 103

“I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers. And I know too how we are labeled.”

—page 346

Conclusion

The book certainly made an impression on me, but I can’t yet describe what that impression was. Most of what I strongly felt, strong enough to look up and say something to my wife, was how just like today everything was. The rampant evil of capitalism, impoverished renters being evicted onto the street with all their meager belongings, the racial violence inherent in policing, the ongoing struggle of women to be treated equally by society, how hard corporations fight back against unionization and worker rights, and so on... From the descriptions in this book to the news I read this morning, it seems we have made very little progress. Perhaps even gone backward in some areas.

But the story itself was not what I was expecting at all and didn’t impress me as I had hoped to be impressed.

 

 

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