Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
**this article contains content that may not be suitable for all readers, including discussion of racial discrimination and sexual assault**
“but live you must, and you can either make passive love to your sickness or burn it out and go on to the next conflicting phase”
Having recently finished this most incredible of books, I am left with so much to say and so much to feel. Not only does Ellison’s work make us question the way in which society views individuals as abstract figures, but it is also gut-wrenchingly powerful in its prose.
The nameless narrator
As our nameless main character, who I felt both endeared to and critical of in certain moments, reflects on his life from a basement in New York, we are taken on a journey across the United States.
While hearing about the path of his life, we never discover our principal character’s name. This is an intriguing device, and is highlighted when he is assigned a ‘new name’ when recruited into the ‘Brotherhood’, an “activist” group who claim that their activities better society. In this anonymity, Ellison blatantly emphasises our protagonist’s invisibility plainly, while also giving him a generic existence, a generic face, a generic applicability to those placed in similar situations. We get to know the man well and yet do not know the simplest of things about him. Perhaps this is a reflection: in acknowledging what one does over the principles of who they are — in noting the public face, motivation, and issues — we miss out on one’s humanity. Someone’s political motivations are not everything of who they are, and perhaps Ellison is attempting to remind us of this.
The concept of one’s own history, which the narrator is somewhat ironically setting out by default of narrating, is a key contemplation of the latter half of the novel. By assessing the path of his life and the ways in which he himself and others around him are remembered, the narrator wonders who is truly within ‘the groove of history’, the ‘forgotten names… like forgotten scenes in dreams’. This links back to the concept of one’s greatest achievements being the things they are known for. While this may not be a mis-step, there is no space in this formula to get to know a person’s core values and day-to-day intentions.
Race
We cannot contemplate Ellison’s distinguished work without talking about race. The sudden death of Clifton, a fellow member of the Brotherhood and a signifier of a promising young man trapped by his invisibility, is both shocking and unfortunately expected through the manner of his “fall” into selling puppets on the street. Indeed, it is in these puppets that Ellison portrays one of his most potent metaphors — by acting in the ways we are supposed to, in displaying ourselves as the products of the messages we are told, we become the toys of those who are writing our narratives: we are no longer the tellers of our own stories. The shooting of an unarmed black man is an unfortunate reality, and Ellison does not shy away from highlighting the insanity of these events. At Clifton’s funeral, the mass of people who seem to be at one in their mourning is disconcerting to our narrator, who becomes, where previously eloquent, choked by the situation. When observing the crowd, he wonders how many are there just for show, and who truly knew the man they were saddened for. Are they mourning for the man, or what the man represents? Because this is just it: it is not blackness that disadvantages Clifton and, indeed, our narrator, but the manner in which they are racialised and posed in society.
In a later segment of the novel, our main character takes on the persona of ‘Rinehart’, a man who is seemingly known by everyone. Ellison seems to ask us whether, truly, he is a man or an entity: a true human that walks on our plain or lifts himself to another level by his concealed appearance and omnipresence. The ability for our protagonist to disguise himself from those who wish him harm both recalls the perceived advantages of invisibility — the way of a racialised black man concealing himself in a swathe, or under a stereotype, to pass by in society — as well as the perception that all people with darker skin are the same and can be painted with the same brush. Within this trope, therefore, Ellison challenges our generalised views of blackness. He questions the need to blend in, conforming to a view of yourself that others impart. It is a marvellous device, demonstrating how the ‘disguise’ of pretending to be that which you’re not shapes the ways in which others treat you (wrongly or rightly), and may be mobilised as ‘a political instrument’.
Who has the power?
To fully appreciate this novel we must discuss ‘the Brotherhood’. Questionable in its motives and mysterious in its actions, this political movement recruits our protagonist at the time they can best take advantage of him — when he is unemployed and needing to pay his lodger, Mary. It is interesting how Ellison shapes our opinions of the group. We begin with a sort of questioning ambivalence, unsure of what this path holds for our protagonist, before being brought along for the ride. We believe, like our protagonist, that the Brotherhood wants equality, wants political turnover, is justified in its motivations. This directly pits us against ‘Ras the Destroyer’, whose more violent views of enacting social change are controversial at their best. Still, it is through our blindness for most of the novel that we see its events: Ellison gives us a lens that is biased by our protagonist, ultimately causing the final turnaround to hit even harder. When the true intentions of the Brotherhood are revealed, we look at ourselves horrified.
Thus, Ellison’s points are brought home. When ‘inside [the Brotherhood]’ we are unable to see the reality of their motivations. Our protagonist is recruited to be one cog in a much bigger machine, being brought into the fold to keep his ideas under its control. The fact of him becoming an autonomous and therefore powerful distinct agent (such as Ras) is a huge sociopolitical risk for them, and therefore must be solved by manipulating him in times of vulnerability.
There are several authority voices in the novel worthy of mention. Bledsoe, the school principal, who conforms to gain an essence of power, treading on those below him to maintain a visage of equality with his white peers. Norton, the white sponsor of the school, who becomes ill and undergoes an ordeal with our narrator and yet does not or rather refuses to recognise him years later. Emerson, the powerful businessman to which our narrator is sent once dismissed from his school, a figure of power that does not need to be seen to be felt. In this latter case, we see the other side of invisibility — that of authoritative invisibility, like that of a god, which is simply taken for granted without requiring proof. The brief presence of Emerson’s son, who reads the deceptive letter that is provided for our narrator by Bledsoe, is interesting. This again shows a hint of that human side to the invisible, but on the other end of the spectrum, where the invisible with power are also parents, siblings, children, and friends. In attempting to help our narrator, the son shuns him somewhat, presenting an image of those who only go part of the way in helping others in order to save themselves. The son is too concerned with his own position and the legacy of his father — perhaps a fear of his father — to pass our narrator on to better things. Instead, our narrator becomes the subject of an experiment.
As the retelling progresses, our protagonist becomes slowly aware of the manner in which he has been ‘controlled’, his fate mastered by the people around him that he believed he could trust. A key example of this is Jack, the primary authority within the Brotherhood who initially seems like he wishes to assist our protagonist in gaining his footing. However, in the ‘same stroke of the pen’, the man deludes our narrator and dooms him, highlighting the layers that exist within a person who is only concerned with their own place in society. This is a warning: Ellison is telling us to be wary of those who attempt to help us, as we cannot be certain of their honesty. Admittedly a bleak outlook, the relevance of this to marginalised groups is conspicuous.
Women and social identity
Turning to the character of Mary, herein we see a representation of those who are selfless despite their position and experiences. Their personality is to help others at cost to themselves, and it is interesting to contrast her character with those that our narrator ends up trusting. There is no blame to place here, it is simply a game of promise and status, which anyone over time can identify with. Mary recognises our narrator when no one else will, because it is in their mutual invisibility that they can be seen. Even so, our narrator must move on, and while he considers her later in the novel he never returns, and thus we never hear what has become of her. She becomes another byproduct of a story manufactured by society’s most powerful agents.
Having considered Mary, another layer of discussion is the role of women in the novel. In one encounter, our protagonist finds himself in the bedroom of ‘Sybil’, a wealthy man’s wife. She has what we may name a fetish for our narrator, or the idea of sleeping with a black man, with the particular angle of a rape fantasy. Not only does her confession lead her to objectify herself, representing the role of women in the sexual sphere, but it also gives the reader a sense of horror. Here, the racialised black man is seen as ‘a domesticated rapist’. Since she has this idea, and is otherwise excluded from sociopolitical discourse, we wonder how Sybil has come to this conclusion, be it through the general discourse around black men in her social circles or direct indoctrination, these scenes speak to the supposition of what a given demographic are and the interactions between two marginalised groups. When groups come together, there may be different outcomes. Namely, banding together to form an alliance, or conflict as a result of one asserting their superiority over the other. In the case of Sybil and our narrator, the lines are blurry, but perhaps by inviting what is seen as an assault on womankind, she believes she is regaining agency. Meanwhile, she is telling the other group in the situation what “his kind” are.
The intersection of societal groups is also seen in the horrific image of hanging ‘mannequins’. They are ‘white, naked, and horribly feminine’, tied to ‘lamppost[s]’. In the escalation, our protagonist wonders whether ‘one is real’, and this unanswered prompt leaves us with prickling skin. The display of these mannequins in clear sight, echoing the hanging of black people in America, represents group conflict in the opposing manner to that with Sybil. Here, Ellison may be telling us that it is not in this combat but in working together that the greatest differences can be made.
What Ellison tells us
I found the closing pages of the novel very emotive. Through all of these events, the suffering and the highs, our protagonist comes to the realisation that ‘it was better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others’. By taking back his autonomy, he re-becomes what he once was in the days of school in a more (perhaps ironically) educated light. Through his experiences, our protagonist is able to reflect that ‘this is the way it’s always been’, it simply took time to see it. This acknowledgement really cements itself after he has been trapped in the sewers, and the comfort he feels there is both unnerving and representative of where we place those who do not “fit” into society.
Ellison proposes us a question: is it those authority figures who hold the true power, or is it in their ‘moving…by the echoed sounds of their own voices’ that they hinder themselves from truly seeing? Our protagonist himself says that he is ‘invisible, not blind’, and perhaps it is this very fact that gives the people not the highest status or social influence, but the highest recognition of the world and its structures for what they are. The more who realise this, our narrator writes, the more we can band together to enforce realisation on those who have drifted their way to success through accepting what has been served to them all of their lives. ‘Step[ping] outside the narrow borders of what men call reality’ may lead us to ‘chaos’, but sometimes it is the upheaval we need to achieve beauty.
To conclude, Ellison’s novel is spectacular in its razor-sharp critique on humanity. Both deeply poetic and thought-provoking, it encapsulates everything I love about writing — it has a message and yet is endlessly beautiful in its prose. Filled with timelessly powerful phrases, both in regards to race and the state of humanity as a whole, Ellison’s work is inspirational. In the epilogue, it is as if he is directly speaking to us, presenting us with his own final thoughts and, to an extent, his judgement and advice. In light of the time in which the novel was written (published in 1952) the undeniable context behind Ellison’s words pushes the emotion behind his points even further. It is striking how much Ellison’s points are still relevant to today’s society: even after 70 years, there are still tragedies, grievances, and unjust systems that reign in the light.
‘The Invisible Man’ is a novel of solidarity and hope. It gives everyone a chance to change, telling us that ‘our fate is to become one, yet many’.