InvIsIble Man

-Ralph Ellison

"I am an invisible man. ... I am invisible; understand, simply because

people refuse to see me."

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison outlines the story of an

African American first-person narrator who narrates his college ordeal of
the battle royal and the attitude of the white elite of the town toward the
African American students.

Significance of the Title

The novel portrays the story of the main character’s past and
focuses on how he began this “invisible man” that he is in his present day. The
title plays an important role in the novel because it focuses the reader on the main
theme Ellison is trying to get across in his novel.

Context of the Novel

 Invisible Man was published in 1952, during the height of racial
segregation in the United States. To keep African Americans apart from
whites following Reconstruction state and local governments in the South
passed laws mandating "separate but equal" treatment for African
Americans.
 These discriminatory "Jim Crow" laws were in place from the 1870s to
the mid-1960s and enforced separation of blacks and whites in schools,
public transportation, restaurants, facilities such as hospitals and
prisons, and even restrooms, swimming pools, and drinking fountains.
 Rather than ensuring "equal treatment," the laws resulted in inferior
conditions for African Americans.
  The laws reflected the views of many Americans—particularly
Southerners—that black people were intellectually and morally inferior.
 Although Invisible Man is not officially a protest novel—in fact, Ellison
maintained that the novel was intended as a comment on humanity—the
narrator's struggles in Invisible Man result from segregation.
 Invisible Man was heavily influenced by the work of a number of
twentieth-century French writers known as the existentialists.
Existentialism, whose foremost proponents included Albert Camus and
Jean-Paul Sartre, explored the question of individuality and the nature
of meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe.
 Ellison adapted the existentialists’ universal themes to the black’s
experience of oppression and prejudice in America. He also engaged
powerfully with the tradition of African-American social debate.

The novel instantly proved a hit and became the best

among the 20 century’s 100 novels and an
th

excellent Bildungsroman.

Bildungsroman

 The word Bildungsroman is a combination of the German word bildung, meaning

formation, and roman, meaning novel.
 The word Bildungsroman is typically capitalized because of its German origin.
 Bildungsroman is a class of novel that depicts and explores the manner in which
the protagonist develops morally and psychologically.
 The German word Bildungsroman means “novel of education” or “novel of
formation.”
 The typical Bildungsroman has a three-part structure -
 The set-up
 Experiences that shape the protagonist's character
 The protagonist reaches maturity
 Variations of Bildungsroman :
 Entwicklungsroman
 Erziehungsroman
 Kunstlerroman
 Zeitroman
  Novel as a Bildungsroman

The genre of Invisible Man is considered African American/Bildungsroman.

African American literature focuses on the struggles and triumphs of
blacks, whether it be fiction or nonfiction. Bildungsroman is a genre
characterized by the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist,
which is very important in Invisible Man as the point of view is Invisible
Man’s stream of consciousness.

Invisible Man functions more specifically within two of the originating

Bildungsroman subgenres: the Erziehungsroman, translating to ‘the novel of
education’, and the Künstlerroman, or the development of the artist novel.

Novel focuses on the narrator's formative years or spiritual awakening and

growth. The narrator struggles to understand his singular existence within
the vastness of larger society, making this an existential novel.

 Point of View

The point of view of the novel is first person. This is seen in the first line of the book where it
states: “I am an invisible man” (Ellison 3). The voice is the narrator and main character. The
name of the main character is never revealed. This is a technique done purposely by the
writer. However the narrator gives way to the journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance
that is reached by the end of the book. Many of the situations he finds himself in, relates
back to his culture, his place in society, and his social identity. The point of view comes from
an individual who views himself a social outcast. He is African American, he is male, he is
young, and he is from the South. He is able to recognize the oppressiveness of the
organization as well as greater society. Through this point of view the audience witnesses the
transformation of the narrator from a naive young man into a mature adult.
 Narrative Techniques in Invisible Man

Ellison gracefully weaves together several extended metaphors of invisibility,

blindness, and enslavement throughout the novel. Multiple layers of meaning
arise from almost every portion of the novel. The narrative techniques of
extended metaphors and symbolism are used to develop the problem of
freedom in American society for the black citizen.

The novel can be studied as an existential one for it deals directly with
questions of individual existence, identity formation, and the meaning of life
for a Black man confronted with racism and cultural stereotypes. He addresses
the existential crisis of the victim of both overt and implicit racism. He
explores the legacy of slavery in American culture, not as a dead past, but as
a living present.

His narrative travels from the Southern experience to the Northern experience,
from the rural to the urban. Most of all, he tries to represent the diverse
elements of American race politics alongside the multifaceted contributions of
the black experience to American culture.

Ralph Ellison’s writing style in Invisible Man might best be described

as symphonic for the way it captures many of the idioms and dialects of the
United States. Ellison also mimics the accented idiom of immigrants like Ras
the Exhorter, the lyrical oratory style of Southern Black preachers, and the
abstract sociological rhetoric of Marxist-Leninist activists.

Ellison’s writing also displays a frequent movement between realism and

surrealism. Invisible Man contains many scenes with conventional descriptions
and dialogue. Ellison carefully balances the realistic and the symbolic dimensions
of Invisible Man.
The tone of Invisible Man is both frank and sardonic. The novel is frank in its
portrayal of the conflict between white and Black communities that persists
nearly one hundred years after the abolition of slavery in the United States.

Foreshadowing plays an important role in Invisible Man, but Ralph Ellison uses
this literary device in a unique way. Instead of pointing to discrete events that
happen just once, Ellison’s use of foreshadowing introduces patterns of events
and motifs that will repeat throughout the novel.

The style of Invisible Man reflects both the complexity of the problem and
Ellison’s pluralistic ideal.

The overall structure of Invisible Man, however, involves cyclical as well as

directional patterns. Framing the main body with a prologue and epilogue set
in an underground burrow, Ellison emphasizes the novel’s symbolic dimension.
The structure also emulates the oral tradition of preliterate societies. Passed
down orally from generation to generation, their stories embodied a people's
culture and history.

A complex, multi-layered novel, Invisible Man can be read as an allegory (a

story with both a literal and symbolic meaning that can be read, understood,
and interpreted at several levels) that traces the narrator's perilous journey
from innocence to experience, and from blind ignorance to enlightened
awareness.

Invisible Man can also be read as a quest narrative. Like Homer's Odyssey and
Dante's Divine Comedy — both of which are alluded to in the novel — Invisible
Man involves a symbolic journey to the underworld, where the narrator must
meet and defeat various monsters — such as Brother Jack — and overcome
seemingly impossible trials in order to return home.
Ellison's use of inverted reality, creating a world that mirrors the reality of
the white world, is a key structural element in Invisible Man.

There are two types of conflicts in the novel:

 The first one is the external conflict that is going on

between the whites and the African American community.

 The second is between the narrator and his mental thinking

about his invisibility.

In the novel, each character's story can be viewed as a lesson that contributes
to the narrator's growth and awareness, bringing him closer to an
understanding of his own people's culture and history.

Ellison bases much of his wordplay on black vernacular, the ordinary language of
black Americans, enriched by colloquial expressions and proverbs as well as
excerpts from songs and stories rooted in African and African American culture.

Ellison achieves much of his comic effect through a unique form of wordplay
called playing the dozens. Rooted in black vernacular, playing the dozens is a
subversive type of wordplay in which the oppressed (blacks) use the language
of the oppressor (whites) against them without directly confronting or openly
challenging the oppressor. This include :
 Puns
 Hyperbole
 Humor
 Irony
 Repetition
 Reversal
 Understatement
ConClusion
This novel belongs to a very specific moment in time, yet it
is deliberately universal; it is an allegorical address, yet it is also an autofictive
individual narrative/history. It is a novel that applies the Bildungsroman’s
generic variations in order to engage with deeper ideological functions: to
subvert the fear and loathing associated with American identity, and to
promote the plurality of its literature and culture.