Product Description

The 'invisible man' is the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison's blistering, impassioned novel of black lives in 1940s America. Defeated and embittered by a country which treats him as non-being, he has retreated into an underground cell, where he smokes, drinks, listens to jazz and recounts his search for identity in white society: as an optimistic student in the Deep South, in the north with the black activist group the Brotherhood, and in the Harlem race riots. Powerfully told, angry and often violent, Invisible Man goes beyond the compelling story of one man to evoke the lives of millions of African-Americans with an urgency that has potent relevance today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42506 in Books
• Published on: 1999-10-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952, The 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 realises he's been duped into believing what hethought 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 colour made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either colour or men".

Invisible Man is certainly a book about race in America, andsadly 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 isa 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, Amazon.com

About the Author
Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma in 1914. He studied music and in 1936 went to live in New York. He started contributing to the Federal Writers' Project (part of Roosevelt's New Deal) and soon his short stories and articles were published. After returning from war service in the Merchant Marines, he concentrated on his writing and, in 1952, his masterpiece Invisible Man was published, seven years after he started it. This established Ellison as a major literary figure. He died in 1994.

Customer Reviews

Hope and integrity displayed in Ralph Ellison's masterpiece.
Written in the aftermath of the Harlem riots, Ellison's 'Invisible Man' surely deserves to be classed as one of the greatest black novels, alongside Wright's 'Native Son' and Morrison's 'Song of Solomon.' The unnamed negro protagonist encounters a huge amount of tests of the self, as he searches to find his identity, and ironicallly only finds fulfilment by escaping underground. Keeping up with a strong tradition of novels on the problematic self in American society, influenced by the likes of Twain and Hemingway, Ellison's only novel of any noteabilty is a major contributor to racial equality in not only America, but the world, and a true example of the human will and courage. I strongly recommend this book for Ellison's techniques of expressionism and realism, which will shed light on the oppresive nature of middle class America and the endlessly impressive struggle that black people and ethnic minorities in America have had to endure.

One of the Most Important Novels of the 50s
Ellison, Baldwin and Wright formed the triumvirate of great African American male novelists of the past 200 years. Of the three, Ellison may well prove to be the most timeless. While Native Son, Black Boy and Go Tell it on a Mountain are powerful works, they don't quite measure up to Invisible Man, in terms of sheer literary genius.

While Ellison wears his influences on his sleeve (Dostoevsky, symbolist poets, existentialist writers, etc.[he even borrows his title from HG Wells]), his writing never suffers or sinks beneath the weight of literary associations. His was a unique voice and vision.

Like Dostoevsky's Underground Man, Ellison's narrator has essentially beat a retreat from the world. He holes up in a subterranean room, where he reflects on the the injustices society has dealt him. Dostoevsky's narrator purposely bumps into people on the Nevsky Prospect in order to certify that he is visible and just as important as the next man. Ellison's Invisible Man beats and almost kills a white man he confronts on an empty street, also in order to rationalize his own existence.

Both the underground man and the invisible man are filled with self loathing. Yet, in Ellison's work, the narrator does achieve a sort of spiritual progress and affirmative self-knowledge. He goes from being a pathetically exploited non-being that must acceed to the whims and wishes of the white opressor (the often anthologized battle royal scene at the beginning of the book), to a point near the conclusion of the book in which he can state he is free to pursue "infinite possibilities."

Irving Howe, in an overall favorable review of the novel, took Ellison to task on several fronts. He complained that the section wherein the narrator falls in with "The Brotherhood" portrays the communist party in an an unrealistic vein. He was also troubled by Ellison's narrative design: "Because the book is written in the first person singular, Ellison cannot establish ironic distance between his hero and himself, or between the matured "I" telling the story and the "I" who is its victim. And because the experience is so apocalyptic and magnified, it absorbs and then dissolves the hero; every minor character comes through brilliantly, but the seeing "I" is seldom seen." Though I generally have a high opinion of Irving Howe's criticism, I think he's arriving at a conclusion here which entirely deflates his own remarks. Yes, the "I" in Invisible Man is harder to see than the other characters, but that is part of the author's construct. It's the very point he makes over and over throughout the novel. How better to portray an "invisible man?"

If you've never read this important work, try reading the first 40 pages that are on display at the US site. It includes the famous battle royal sequence, which is one of the best hook chapters in all of literature. It should be enough to induce you to read the rest of the novel. You are in for an unforgettable read.

Racial injustice and isolation
IM is split, roughly, into three parts- the narrator's time at university, his life working in New York and his association with the political movement known as "the brothers". Added to these are the scenes from the beginning and end of the novel- that of the narrator's eventual self-isolation from society and his early naivety seen in the boxing chapter early in the book.
Through these different sections we see how racism was rife in 1950's America- in the educational system, at work, in politics and also inherent in every part of day-to-day social interaction. IM is the retelling of the events that made a young black man turn from accepting the status quo to actively shunning it. The change in him is enormous and he is unrecognisable as the amiable, intelligent man who exists in most of the story when he attacks a white man later in his life.
Although the title of the book and its beginning and its end is about the "invisible man" and the narrators escape from society this is a comparatively small section and is sandwiched by the rest of the novel that forms its majority. In this respect IM never is as bitter as synopsis of the story would have you believe- much of the narrative has our narrator listen and observe what is going on around him without forming an opinion. This means that whilst IM is an important and often stirring read it is never too uncomfortable or entirely bleak. Ellison's writing skill also makes IM easy to read and always absorbing.
This is a very important novel and at the same time totally engrossing. The length of the novel can seem off putting when you first pick it up but the content is never slow or dull. Whether you are interested in civil rights and racism in the USA during the 1950's or not you will come away from this novel enlightened.