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Invisible Man
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780679732761
Edition: 2
ISBN: 0679732764
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 608
Publication Date: March 14, 1995
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: March 14, 1995
Studio: Vintage
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Editorial Review:
We rely, in this world, on the visual aspects of humanity as a means of learning who we are. This, Ralph Ellison argues convincingly, is a dangerous habit. A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952, Invisible Man chronicles the travels of its narrator, a young, nameless black man, as he moves through the hellish levels of American intolerance and cultural blindness. Searching for a context in which to know himself, he exists in a very peculiar state. "I am an invisible man," he says in his prologue. "When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me." But this is hard-won self-knowledge, earned over the course of many years.
As the book gets started, the narrator is expelled from his Southern Negro college for inadvertently showing a white trustee the reality of black life in the south, including an incestuous farmer and a rural whorehouse. The college director chastises him: "Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie! What kind of an education are you getting around here?" Mystified, the narrator moves north to New York City, where the truth, at least as he perceives it, is dealt another blow when he learns that his former headmaster's recommendation letters are, in fact, letters of condemnation.
What ensues is a search for what truth actually is, which proves to be supremely elusive. The narrator becomes a spokesman for a mixed-race band of social activists called "The Brotherhood" and believes he is fighting for equality. Once again, he realizes he's been duped into believing what he thought was the truth, when in fact it is only another variation. Of the Brothers, he eventually discerns: "They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves.... Here I thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either color or men."
Invisible Man is certainly a book about race in America, and sadly enough, few of the problems it chronicles have disappeared even now. But Ellison's first novel transcends such a narrow definition. It's also a book about the human race stumbling down the path to identity, challenged and successful to varying degrees. None of us can ever be sure of the truth beyond ourselves, and possibly not even there. The world is a tricky place, and no one knows this better than the invisible man, who leaves us with these chilling, provocative words: "And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" --Melanie Rehak
Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be. The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Quiet Rage Turned into High Art
This novel, a model of creative writing, describes what it is like to land in a big city and then be sucked up into the black hole of urban life in America. It is a story told by a black man coming of age in the mid-1940s, and thus is about black anonymity in a white world. But one of the primary strengths of the novel is that its "meta-messages" are all about anonymity and thus makes it universal and applicable equally to any race and even to any urban culture.
It is existential in ... Read More
Rating: - The Search for Human Identity
Many reviewers found the main theme in the book to be about race relations, and in particular, about black identity in a white world. I don't entirely agree with this take on the book - at least not for the book as a whole. Some reviewers group this book in with a genre of "African American Literature". Sure, one can conclude this because the protagonist is black, but I think it belongs in the realm of "classic literature" without the African-American qualifier. I think so because though the protagonist ... Read More
Rating: - Speaks Truth to Power!
He speaks truth to power, and when you speak truth, you are going to be despised.
One of my many favorite Ralph Ellison's truths:
"I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was more satisfied -- not even I. On the other hand, I've never been more loved and appreciated that when I tried to "justify" and affirm someone's misgtaken beliefs; or when I have tried to give ... Read More
Rating: - Superb
This is a superb novel about a young black man trying to find his place in the world. It is filled with interesting characters and scenes and has a decent pace. I believe this book is more than about race: it applies to all people trying to form an identity for themselves. I have read some of the negative reviews, and quite a few of them seem to be from high school students. I think many of their points are valid, but I wonder if a little age and experience can make one look at this story in a different light. ... Read More
Rating: - Masterpiece
Triumph of 20th century Afro-American literature and that specific historical/cultural perspective. For me, much more powerful and
instructive than Native Son, Song of Solomon, or any such treatise.
Enjoy.
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