Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man deals with the inability of the people around the protagonist to see him as a black man, thus failing to respect himself and his humanity. The protagonist takes readers on a journey of truths as he tells his tale, starting with his home in the South and moving on to his current living quarters in a hole in the North—in Harlem. Ellison uses symbolism to give life to every detail from the lyrics of a song to the name of a preacher. Ellison's narrator persuades readers that America's failure to notice him has led him to a life of invisibility. The key motifs in the book are blindness, invisibility, and masks. The major conflict is the character's search for a place of his own and his own identity—throughout his many tribulations, he is never complete or able to live up to the social standards that people place on him. The invisible man, which is the only name by which the narrator allows readers to know him, is throughout the novel searching for a place in society, and every search leads to disappointment.

In the prologue, a young black man from the South begins telling his story. In one of the most important sections of the book, Chapter 1: Battle Royal, the narrator explains his quest to find something. He speaks to his grandfather, an ex-slave who tells him not to be the traitor to blacks that he has been. His grandfather implies that he has lived a quiet life but also a life of submissiveness, thus representing an aspect of the narrator. The narrator recalls his high school graduation speech, in which he promoted submissiveness as the way for blacks to succeed, mentioning Booker T. Washington, who shares this belief. He is asked to read his high school speech at a banquet for the white male elite in the town. His initial excitement quickly vanishes, however, as he realizes that he and his friends are to brawl with the other black boys of the community for the entertainment of the town's big shots. The young men are humiliated; they are bullied into looking at a stripper, to fight with one another with blindfolds on, and to scramble over fake money on an electric mat. The narrator has a dream that night that his diploma and life mean nothing; this is just one example of Ellison's irony. Just as the white men have these young black men fighting in an environment that will never allow them to win, the narrator soon finds that his environment in contemporary America will not allow him to win as a black man because it fails to notice him. This first chapter sets the tone of the novel, the tone that then follows the narrator to college and his life in a hole in Harlem.

When the narrator goes to Harlem, he is able to see the unworthiness that accompanies being black, and how many people behave unethically in order to gain power. One character in the novel, Tod Clifton, is a member of the Brotherhood, a political organization in Harlem that works for blacks in the community and that the Invisible Man is a part of. Clifton leaves the organization and begins selling Sambo dolls, which represent lazy black men. The narrator is unhappy about his friend's new career and frustrated that Clifton thinks nothing of it. It is irony like this that Ellison fills the novel with, people who in the midst of confusion do not see their confusion and are blind to the situation that they are in.

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