Welcome to...INVISIBLE MAY.

I've done it again. Another impeccable pun combining the title of a seminal work with the month it currently is. Another paragon of literature added to my currently reading. Another several-week period that shall be spent reading it, one chapter at a time, daily.

It's another PROJECT LONG CLASSIC installment. If saying you want to read long classics counts as reading them, I'm the smartest girl in the world. And now I'm reading them, also. Let's get started.

The prologue reveals my rather cool nonsense behavior of loving to own a book for 8 years without ever picking it up and then immediately finding it compulsively readable from the very first page.

From chapter one, it's clear this would be a solid read for me, and it's going to be brutal and excellent. The theme of what white people want and expect and reward in Black people is shown brilliantly in chapter two, with the fascinating dichotomy between how the intellectual student and the castout are treated by the millionaire.

Chapter three has a kind of cool idea that in old times, very little that could ail you couldn't be cured by a glass of whiskey at a strip club. I love a secret code as seen in chapter four. Additionally, this book has some of the most gorgeous and visual descriptions I've read in recent memory, as noted in chapter five.

We're going to the big city in chapter six! As I progress through the chapters, I find it very hard to come up with my goofy little entries for each day of this project when I think each chapter is very good and I keep taking it seriously.

The story has many cliffhangers, like in chapter eight, where "something had to happen tomorrow, and it did. I got a letter" feels suspenseful to me. In chapter nine, a rich white daddy's boy telling our protagonist that he's the one who's "freed" while he's trapped and can be his valet is quite something.

The story takes some interesting turns, like when he's working in the Liberty White Paint factory in chapter ten, officially moving into metaphor city. Medical malpractice in chapter eleven is horror-movie-level scary. The descriptions like "the cool splash of sleep" in chapter twelve are really good.

We're getting into the invisibility origin story in chapter thirteen, and also my own origin story of accidentally reinventing the word "invisibleness". The party in chapter fourteen is an induction into the revolution, which is great. Breaking ugly decorations in a home should be a right, as mentioned in chapter fifteen.

It's speech time in chapter sixteen, and watching the descriptions switch from beautiful and pastoral to the same language and style for violence and suffering in chapter seventeen is quite wow. The worst kind of sabotage is when the person messing things up is not malicious but just dumb, as seen in chapter eighteen.

The Woman Question in chapter nineteen sounds like me asking my boyfriend something at the wrong moment. We begin to witness the titular invisibility in chapter twenty, although I got a bit ahead of myself. The book has that specific high school assigned reading feeling in chapter twenty-two.

In chapter twenty-three, we see literature's favorite problem-solving tactic of relying on a woman. The penultimate chapter, chapter twenty-four, almost lost me, but I think I'm back on board in chapter twenty-five as we finally reach the invisibility.

The epilogue brings it all full circle. Overall, this is a very clever, incisive, and allegorical book with a compelling plot, although there was one chapter I hated and 24 that I truly enjoyed. Rating: 4.

Is it always Ellisonian invisibility to not be seen as an individual? To have an ephemeral, contingent identity? One subject to the distortions of the objectification of classificatory prejudgment? In short, no. And if you don't really get that, but want to, this may be the book for you.

I'd slept on this one for way too long. The language of the book is compulsively readable, and the polyphony is quite an earful. This experience is enhanced by Joe Morton's audiobook performance, which I listened to while reading. Sure, the plot requires some suspension of disbelief, but that this is an unreal realism is probably the point.

The multifarious instantiations of racist oppression range in density and provide a depth of analytical riches. Yet, for me, the genius of this text lies just as much in its constructedness. It is the psychic distance produced by the almost unbearable naivety of the unnamed narrator which may explain its ability to draw in the "liberal" conscience, only to expose the sickness of rationalization as equally bankrupt as naked, fearful aggression. And when you realize the irony of the central metaphor, that invisibility is indistinguishable from a pervasive blindness, you know you've really only scratched the surface.

In the parlance, sleep no more.

It should be noted that I had a hard time processing the rape-fantasy that occurs just before the final scenes of the book. Though there is obviously not a single monolithic feminist lens, and there's certainly intersectionality here, I left this scene feeling that it is a problem.

I’m embarrassed to admit that for many years I held a wrong perception. I thought this book was the basis for the Claude Rains movie where his wardrobe mainly included sunglasses and Ace wrap. Once I was corrected about that idea, I still took my time in reading it. The title gave the impression of a character who, although not truly invisible, was of such little significance that his very existence went unnoticed by others. Obviously, this is a treatise on racism. And since I already knew that racism is bad, I wondered what the point of reading it was.

Fortunately, I read it anyway and was amazed to discover that it is a stunningly brilliant book. It is the National Book Award winning story of an unnamed young black man’s rise and fall as a community organizer in Harlem during the 1930s and 40s. It does have a lot to say about racism, but it does so without finger-pointing or animosity. It displays racism in all its forms, from the ultra-degrading smoker scene in chapter two to the ill-conceived gaffs by well-meaning acquaintances and Brother Jack’s imperious “The brother does not sing!”. In some places, it felt as if every page had some subtle or unsubtle slight, to the point where I thought of the old torture called “death by a thousand cuts”.

While no assessment of the black experience in America would be complete without a discussion of racism, Invisible Man is so much more than that. I could talk for hours about the many fascinating ideas that Ellison imparts. But I will just describe one chapter out of the many great ones he created. In this chapter, our narrator gets a job at a paint factory. As he approaches the building, he sees a sign that says “KEEP AMERICA PURE WITH LIBERTY PAINTS”. Nothing more is said about the sign, but it immediately reminds me of a conversation where a woman told my aunt that “It’s so rare these days to find someone who is pure” (pronounced PEW-uhh). From there, it’s easy to picture a Klan rally with a fiery orator expressing the need to “keep America pew-uhh”. Once on the job, the narrator is tasked with mixing Optic White paint, which is so white that you can paint a chunk of coal and you’d have to crack it open with a sledgehammer to prove it wasn’t white through and through. The joke is that to make this “purest white that can be found” paint, you have to add exactly 10 drops of dead black dope. Again, Ellison makes no comment on the absurdity of this, but I have been pondering and theorizing about what he meant by it ever since I read that chapter.

Bottom line: Ralph Ellison is one of those brilliant authors who doesn’t tell his readers what to think. Instead, he tells you a story and lets you run with it. I suspect I will be running with this story for a long time to come.

Read in 2018


“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”


Invisible Man is a remarkable American classic. It is part a madman's rambling stream of consciousness and part a touching story of a confused young black man grappling with racial identity. What made this novel truly special for me was the narration of Joe Morton. I seldom listen to audiobooks, but I was fortunate to obtain this one as an Audible offer. I am extremely glad that I chose to listen to this book rather than read it. The entire experience was enhanced by the wonderful narration. It is highly recommended. However, I still prefer Black Boy as a classic on race in the US.


“What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?” This thought-provoking question lingers in my mind even after finishing the book. It makes me reflect on my own life and the choices I have made. Invisible Man not only tells a story but also makes the reader think deeply about issues such as race, identity, and self-discovery.

The novel's exploration of these themes is both powerful and poignant. It shows how society's expectations can sometimes blind us to the true essence of a person. The invisible man in the story struggles to find his place in a world that seems to deny his existence. His journey is one of self-discovery and acceptance. Through his experiences, we learn about the importance of being true to ourselves and not conforming to the expectations of others.

Overall, Invisible Man is a must-read for anyone interested in American literature, race relations, or the human condition. It is a book that will stay with you long after you have turned the last page.

Most capital-G Great books can be a rather grim trudge, much like doing homework.

Invisible Man, however, is one of the rare exceptions. It is not only relentlessly and unapologetically entertaining, filled with exciting elements such as brawls, explosions, double-crosses, and the exuberant mad.

Moreover, as a profound meditation on race, it remains as fresh as if it had been first published just yesterday.

It is truly one of the most essential American novels ever written. Only the very best of the best can be placed beside it, such as Grapes of Wrath, Huckleberry Finn, To Kill A Mockingbird, and True Grit.

These works all share the ability to capture the essence of the American experience and explore complex themes in a powerful and engaging way. Invisible Man, with its unique blend of entertainment and depth, has rightfully earned its place among the literary classics.

The chief irony, as has been emphasized through various article headlines, is truly remarkable. In creating a most astonishing portrait of an invisible man, Ralph Ellison, almost paradoxically, became arguably the most prominent black writer of all time. (Toni Morrison, of course, would also merit significant consideration). This irony stems from Ellison's use of key events from his own life as the basis for the major plot elements of his novel. These include attending an all-black college, relocating north, and having communist associations. After sharing this story of invisibility, he suddenly found himself showered with praise and winning numerous awards.

However, this irony is perhaps most acutely perceived through the lens of our 21st-century perspective. We must not forget that "Invisible Man" was released in 1952, a full dozen years before the landmark Civil Rights Act. For Ellison, his newfound visibility was often seen as the ascent of a great Negro writer, despite his best efforts to distance himself from that label. And, quite frankly, the critics of his era were mistaken. "Invisible Man" is not merely a great work of African American fiction; it is a truly great and timeless work of art.

Ellison skillfully depicts the struggle of the Invisible Man as a battle between rationality (embodied by education, logic, and reason) and irrationality (manifested through patronization, racism, and Jim Crow). The undertones of paranoia that color the Invisible Man's experiences foreshadow the works of writers like Pynchon and DeLillo, who, it should be noted, do not typically engage with Negro themes. The Invisible Man is a universal figure because he represents any rational individual attempting to navigate an irrational society. While the specific plot points undeniably deal with black themes of racism and black identity, they do so in a manner no different from how Philip Roth explores anti-semitism and Jewish identity.

Moreover, Ellison incorporates nuanced symbolism borrowed from Europe's Modernist movement. The black puppet that Tod Clifton sells, the briefcase that accompanies the Invisible Man on his journey, and the paint company representing white supremacy (whose paint is used on government buildings) are all more reminiscent of Joyce or Eliot than of Langston Hughes.

Yet, within this Western-styled novel with a universal narrator and protagonist, the most profound ideas about black identity are explored. The Invisible Man's experiences highlight how white men often view black colleges as a means to build a legacy rather than to promote black equality. The Brotherhood (a loose parallel of the communist party, with which Ellison had a falling out) exploits racial inequality and blacks' frustration with the status quo for its own purposes of agitation and propaganda, rather than to truly help blacks achieve equality. At every turn, the Invisible Man is used, never consulted for his opinions or ideas, but simply told what is best for him. Even the black authority figures, like the brutal Dr. Bledsoe, use the Invisible Man, subtly manipulating him and driving him underground.

This irrationality, which has allowed a nation founded on freedom to tolerate slavery, to uphold tenets like "separate but equal," and to pigeonhole a master novelist and artist as a "Negro writer," is a central theme of the novel. However, within "Invisible Man," there is also a glimmer of hope for reconciliation. While the Prologue is filled with violence, drug use, and theft, the Epilogue contains philosophical gestures of understanding and reluctant acceptance. Just as Ellison himself attempted to bridge racial divides and use his individual intelligence and creativity to expose the irrationality of white racial prejudice, he also lamented his own race's reluctance to fully engage with Western art and ideas and not simply rely on minority provincialism. For Ellison, blacks are not just minorities; they are an integral part of the American consciousness, and he, more than anyone, gave them a voice.

A powerful novel; one of the must reads.

Written shortly after the Second World War, it is the classic study of invisibility; what it means not to be "seen" in society. Set in the US, it is an unflinching analysis of racism at all levels of society. The unnamed narrator starts in the South at college and continues in New York. Ellison pours into his writing his frustrations with the attitude of the left in America just after the Second World War.

There are some memorable characters. I would like to have seen more of Ras, who was a fascinating and complex character. There is a rich vein of humour in the book, but there is a brutal realism as well. The opening of the book is one of its great strengths as Ellison sets the stall for the whole novel. The narrator's initial hopes are gradually dashed and disillusionment very slowly sets in. He sees the suffering of those around him and the practical effects of racism and discovers he has a voice and can move people. What to do with that voice? This is where the Brotherhood comes in.

The Brotherhood is a left-wing/Marxist organisation committed to radical change in society and Ellison is reflecting his own experiences with the left. The narrator is given a job with the Brotherhood, to assist with their efforts in Harlem. The Brotherhood have sections which deal with different aspects of their work and the committee dictates policy and practice. The narrator is taken out of poverty and given a new flat, but is bound by policies which he does not always understand. At one point the narrator is taken away from Harlem to work on the issue of women's rights because the committee disapproves of some of his actions. The incendiary climax can clearly be seen coming, but is no less shocking and poignant; the futility of it all is striking. The real villains are the Brotherhood. The racists are, well, racist and behave as you would expect. However the Brotherhood are about equality and change in society and ought to know better, but they turn out to be just as racist and lacking in compassion as the rest.

I remember being involved in debates in my youth concerning left wing politics. Whether it was race, gender, sexuality, the environment; everything was secondary to the primacy of how Marx said things should happen in terms of revolution and change; economic issues were always primary. Others issues when it came down to it were irrelevant, a great mistake as Ellison powerfully shows. The Brotherhood use the race issue when it suits them and discard it when it does not without a thought for the people involved.

I'd like to say that things are completely different to when this was written; in many ways times have changed, but there are still indicators that old attitudes may be dormant rather than gone. When times are difficult people still vote for those who play on fears and prejudice (the last few days in the UK have shown that); outsiders are still stereotyped. That is what makes this book and Ellison's message so important. It serves as a reminder that we must always be vigilant against the return of old prejudices and strive for true equality and understanding in society.

I had no idea what to anticipate when I opened this book. It had been sitting in my home for years, maybe even decades. My mother had bought it for some forgotten reason in a different era. Of course, I knew that Ellison was a prominent black writer. But I was unaware that he was a writer with nearly Flaubertian perfectionism and nearly Melvillian intellectual depth. For this novel is both meticulous and ambitious.

Two writers have already been mentioned, but a third immediately springs to mind: Kafka. Like that gloomy bohemian, Ellison writes stories with a kind of surreal, nightmarish quality that teeters on the edge of plausibility. The rapid pacing also keeps the reader off-kilter. Although this novel is rather long, an awful lot occurs between the first page and the last. Every time I expected a lull in the action, a moment of routine or reflection, Ellison plunged his protagonist into another muddle, which definitely makes for exciting reading.

However, the most remarkable aspect of this book is Ellison's systematic exploration of the various ways that African Americans have confronted the country's racism. We start with Booker T. Washington-style uplift and accommodationism, progress to political movements such as communism and black nationalism, and conclude with near total disillusionment. Particularly fascinating for me was Ellison's examination of leftist politics and how its intense focus on class consciousness could overshadow the realities of racial resentment.

After Invisible Man was released to almost universal acclaim, Ellison would spend the remainder of his life working on a novel that he never deemed fit to publish. He left over 2,000 pages of the manuscript upon his death, which was later condensed and published as Juneteenth. In other words, if Ellison was content to send this book to the printer, it met standards far higher than mine.

I am truly in awe of his literary prowess and the profound insights he offers in this remarkable work.

This novel can make you angry. It is a story of a young black man's arduous search for his place under the sun. There is a heavy emphasis on being black and the numerous difficulties that he has to endure solely because of his black skin. This book is truly oozing with racism. It vividly portrays the problem of being a black during the 20's - 50's, not only in the Deep South but also in the North, which is now called the Land of Freedom, of the Brave, and of Opportunities. This book seems to scream at us: Black. BLAck. BLACK.

The eloquent unnamed narrator is a black man who participates in a brutal contest in an arena. There, the black contestants are blindfolded and made to fight each other while white men watch and throw their bids. In the opening scene, he wins a scholarship to a black college in the Deep South during one of these fights. He goes to study in that college, only to be expelled through the maneuvering of a black person. So, he goes to the North and works in a paint company. There, he faces discrimination and joins a political (communist) group called The Brotherhood. Eventually, he gets into trouble and is forced to go underground and becomes "invisible."

"Invisibility" in all its interpretations can be attributed, in various ways, to most of the characters. They are invisible because white people blatantly ignore black people. They are invisible because black people sometimes allow themselves to be discriminated against. They are invisible because even black people have their own biases and prejudices against those of their own color. They are invisible because white women characters in this book use black men to fulfill their sexual fantasies. The narrator gives in, believing that those women are also invisible.

I do not have a friend who is black. I have never had the opportunity to have one. Even in our home office in Ohio, where my boss asks me to visit on a yearly basis, the only black employee is the utility guy. However, the discrimination that the black narrator had to go through is similar to what I see everywhere. Discrimination is not only about the color of one's skin. It can be as ugly as that based on gender, age, social status, educational attainment, or even sexual preference. And those forms of discrimination can happen everywhere, every day.

This novel is a Bildungsroman. Like Saul Bellow's Augie in The Adventures of Augie March, the narrator searches for his place in the sun. Augie had difficulties because he was looking for a job during the Great Depression in the 30's. The narrator, the Invisible Man, happens to be born at the height of black discrimination in the US during the 20 - 60's. Augie ended up well. The Invisible Man started in a hole and ended up back in that hole. However, with Barrack Obama at the nation's driver's seat, the Invisible Man must have already surfaced and is now showing himself that BLACK is at par with white.

Just like the allusion of the Optic White paint in the plant where the Invisible Man works, black can actually heighten the whiteness. A black man can drive a powerful country like the US back to its forefront where it deserves to stay.

“It’s not an important novel. I failed of eloquence and many of the immediate issues are rapidly fading away.” said Ralph Ellison in an interview after Invisible Man was published in 1952 and was showered with praise & won the National Book Award (& since then is a regular in lists of greatest 20th century novels.)

Regarding the fading away of immediate issues, in one episode, a black guy is chased by a cop, turns and lands a punch on the cop, who falls, points his gun and shoots the black guy dead. This whole sequence up to and including the community’s outrage and the local politician’s grandstanding has been replicated beat for beat in all those recent police killings (and the next one when it comes) in the USA. The duplication was stunning. So with respect, Ralph was wrong about the fading away of some of his issues. Unfortunately.

WHERE DO I BEGIN

This is quite a tough book to review. It’s big and very loud. There is a long winding road our unnamed young black man takes from true believer to bitter cynic, and this happens not once but twice.

You could say he is an invisible man, not seen as a real person by anyone, and at the same time, it takes him a long time to see through the fabrications of other people. I guess you could say that!

Firstly he gets disillusioned with his black college – specifically with the nasty unprincipled Principal. Then he moves to Harlem and gets employed by the Communist Party, which RE calls the Brotherhood. He fairly quickly realizes that he is simply a material, a natural resource to be used. And further, that when it comes to black people, the CP weren’t enlightened at all.

THE B WORD

About half of this large novel is about our guy and his struggles inside the Brotherhood. The reader gets awfully tired of this “B word”. Maybe it is supposed to be a humorous exaggeration of the way communists talked, but it wears thin.

WHAT THE NEW YORK TIMES SAID AT THE TIME

Parts of it consist of long and impassioned, sometimes hysterical, reveries which are frequently highly obscure. Other parts still seem grotesquely exaggerated or repetitious. And these strange interludes are overwritten in an ultra pretentious, needlessly fancy way. Spasms of torrential rhetoric, they obscure the point of some of Mr. Ellison's symbolic incidents and check temporarily the swift course of his story.

This is a book full of big talkers, and none bigger than our embattled narrator. RE loves to conjure up towering piles of lurid anguished frothy clogged meditations at the drop of a hat. It gives a stop-start feeling to the whole thing. Maybe some of the more repetitious bitter self-accusations could have been snipped.

LINGUISTIC NOTE

There is one f word, one more surprising c word, and several mentions of people being “motherfoulers”. Also one mention of the word “groovy” in an approbatory sense. Also: “You black and beautiful!” on p301.

CONFRONTING STEREOTYPES

There are stereotypes everywhere you look. There is the toadying stooge Dr Bledsoe, Ras the Exhorter who promotes Black Nationalism, an older black woman who briefly turns into the mother he never had, a white woman who wants our guy to pretend to rape her, the party apparatchiks especially Brother Jack, and looters and rioters from central casting. Our guy spends the whole novel trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Eventually he decides the best place to be is in a basement underground, hiding from the world. It’s such a melancholy image.

   “¿Qué hice yo para ser tan negro, para ser tan triste?” (Black and blue)

I am a man, a white person living in a white country, without any remarkable physical or mental disabilities, and belonging to a more or less comfortable middle class. I am capable of being indignant and/or moved by the scenes of humiliation and scorn that Ellison so well relates, but it is by no means easy for me to fully understand what is told here, what it means to live as a third-class citizen in a world dominated by those who use you, humiliate you and deny any possibility of claiming your rights, who treat you as if you were nobody, an invisible man. People who, in order to survive, will have to adopt a mask that will eventually become part of their own personality, forced to constantly measure their words, their actions and even their own thoughts and feelings, to be careful with everything and everyone. A state of affairs that is further complicated when having to live with the servile complacency of many who, in the same situation, resignedly endure it, if not encourage and consolidate it, or with those who cynically accept it and use it for their own benefit. And even more so if one feels, like the narrator and protagonist of the novel, responsible for such a state of affairs and with the need to remedy it.

   “Te enseñaron a aceptar la insensatez de los viejos como el que tienes ante ti, incluso en el caso de que los considerases unos lamentables payasos. Te enseñaron a actuar como si les respetaras y reconocieras en ellos una autoridad y un poder que tienen en tu mundo la misma naturaleza que la autoridad y el poder de los blancos ante los que ellos se humillan y mendigan, a los que ellos temen, aman e imitan. E incluso te enseñaron a aceptar la actitud de esta gente cuando furiosos o despectivos o ebrios de poder te amenazaban con un látigo o un palo, sin que tú pudieras permitirte contestar su ataque sino tan sólo evitar sus golpes...”

Along with this racial issue, which can be transferred to any other field of social marginalization, the novel deals with the problem of the organization of the struggle against such a state of affairs and how these organizations functioned (function). The criticism is fierce, perhaps too much.


The great innocence and optimism that characterized the labor struggle at the beginning of the last century, embodied in phrases like “Día llegará en que el trabajo y la diversión sean una misma cosa, porque reinstauraremos el placer en el trabajo” , was mixed with the ironclad control of thought and the hard party discipline that saw any questioning as a betrayal of the ends and ideas. A control and a discipline whose consequences were more bloody since many times they responded exclusively to the ego and the ambitions of those who exercised it.

   “Ahora sé que los hombres se diferencian entre sí, que la vida está infinitamente dividida y diversificada, y que sólo en la diversidad cabe hallar el equilibrio verdadero.”

The novel is harsh and poetic, politically brave, emotionally feverish and, from a literary point of view, more than remarkable. I completely disagree with the opinion of those who qualify its reading as difficult or burdensome. It is quite the opposite. The novel is full of exciting scenes in more than one sense, of great dialogues and, although there is an abundance of political and social reflections and disquisitions, there is also action, intrigue and suspense. A great work.

This work is strongly reminiscent of German Expressionist drama from the early 20th century.

Unfortunately, it suffers from a significant flaw in character development. Beyond the protagonist, every other character seems to be flattened, reduced to mere representatives of a whole class or demographic. They are like episodic figures in his life, serving only to contribute to his personal development, his awareness of society's deep-seated decay, and his inevitable and predictable journey towards disillusionment. In essence, it is a rather heavy-handed, youthful, and stereotype-ridden book.

To be fair, it does hold some value as a historical object. It also serves as an interesting contrast to other works of American literature, given that there aren't too many books of this kind. However, when judged on its own merits, I don't believe it merits great praise. The prose lacks distinction, the handling of the dialect is not particularly graceful, and it has an irritating habit of stating the obvious and self-interpreting. Moreover, the author even takes the liberty of drawing attention to the fact that he is choosing to rant at the reader for the last five pages, which is a blatant admission of weakness.

Nevertheless, I am awarding it two stars in a "it was okay" sort of way. I'm not overly disappointed that I read it, but I have no intention of reading it again, teaching it, or recommending it to anyone.