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Invisible Man is a 1952 novel by Ralph Ellison, the only one published during his lifetime. It explores the social and intellectual issues faced by African Americans in the early 20th century, and won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1953.
- Ralph Ellison
- 1952
- Overview
- Summary
- Analysis
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Invisible Man, novel by Ralph Ellison, published in 1952. It was Ellison’s only novel to be published during his lifetime. Invisible Man is widely acknowledged as one of the great novels of American literature and a landmark in African American literature, winning the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, the first novel by a Black author to rec...
The narrator of Invisible Man is a nameless young Black man who moves in a 20th-century United States where reality is surreal and who can survive only through pretense. Because the people he encounters “see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination,” he is effectively invisible.
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He leaves the South for New York City, but his encounters continue to disgust him. Ultimately, he retreats to a hole in the ground, which he furnishes and makes his home. There, brilliantly illuminated by stolen electricity, he can seek his identity; as he says, “When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.”
The invisibility of Ellison’s protagonist is about the invisibility of identity—above all, what it means to be a Black man—and its various masks, confronting both personal experience and the force of social illusions. Invisible Man’s special quality is its deft combination of existential inquiry into identity as such—what it means to be socially or racially invisible—with a more sociopolitical allegory of the history of the African American experience in America. The first-person narrator remains nameless, retrospectively recounting his shifts through the surreal reality of surroundings and people from the racist South to the no less inhospitable world of New York City.
Invisible Man bears comparison with the existentialist novels of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus; the dehumanized narrator’s path toward alienation has points in common in particular with Camus’s early novels The Stranger and The Plague. It also maps out the story of one man’s identity against the struggles of collective self-definition. This takes the narrator-protagonist through the circumscribed social possibilities afforded to African Americans, from enslaved grandparents through Southern education, to models associated with Booker T. Washington, through to the full range of Harlem politics. Ellison’s almost sociological clarity in the way he shows his central character working through these possibilities is skillfully worked into a novel about particular people, events, and situations, from the nightmare world of the ironically named Liberty Paints to the Marxist-Leninist machinations of the Brotherhood. In the process, Ellison offers sympathetic but severe critiques of the ideological resources of Black culture, such as religion and music.
Fierce, defiant, and utterly funny, Ellison’s tone mixes various idioms and registers to produce an impassioned inquiry into the politics of being.
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A classic of American literature and African American literature, Invisible Man explores the identity and alienation of a nameless Black narrator in a surreal and racist society. The novel won the National Book Award in 1953 and influenced existentialist and sociopolitical genres.
- Drew Milne
A classic novel by Ralph Ellison about a Black man's struggle for identity and freedom in a racist society. The narrator, an invisible man, recounts his experiences in the South, the North, and the Brotherhood, a political organization that exploits him.
- Ralph Ellison
- 1952
A classic novel about a black man's journey through racism and identity in America. Read reviews, ratings, quotes, and more on Goodreads, the world's largest community for readers.
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Jun 1, 2018 · A comprehensive overview of Ellison's novel, which explores the themes of invisibility, identity, and pluralism in American culture. The article examines the narrative structure, style, and symbolism of the novel, as well as its historical and literary contexts.
The narrator is a talented young man, and is invited to give his high school graduation speech in front of a group of prominent white local leaders. At the meeting, the narrator is asked to join a humiliating boxing match, a battle royal, with some other black students.
A concise biography of Ralph Ellison plus historical and literary context for Invisible Man.
