Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
Summary
The narrator has no name, and by the time he tells you his story he is living rent free in a forgotten basement on the edge of Harlem, burning 1,369 light bulbs on stolen electricity, because, as he explains he is invisible: people simply refuse to see him.
The life that drove him underground is a tour of every role America offered a Black man in the first half of the century, each one a costume handed to him by someone else. The Southern schoolboy, made to fight blindfolded in a battle royal for the amusement of the town's white men before being tossed his scholarship. The model student, expelled by the college president Dr Bledsoe for showing a white trustee the actual South, and sent north with sealed letters of reference that say, in effect, keep this nigger boy running. The industrial worker, in the basement of a paint factory whose prize product is Optic White. The orator, recruited by the Brotherhood, a party that needs a Harlem voice and discards Harlem the moment doctrine requires. Around the edges move Ras the Exhorter, preaching Black nationalism from a ladder, and Rinehart, the man of a thousand surfaces, until the Harlem riot burns the last costume off.
Ellison writes it in every register at once, realism, surrealism, sermon, blues, and the book is funnier than its reputation warns.
Around five hundred and eighty pages.
Best for readers ready for the great American novel of race and identity, and a narrator who has earned every word of his rage and his jokes.
Historical Context & Significance
Invisible Man won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, making Ralph Ellison the first Black writer to take the award, one year after the novel's publication had made him famous. Orville Prescott in the New York Times called it the most impressive fiction by an American Negro he had ever read, praise whose framing is itself a document of the era; the book's standing has only risen since, with the Modern Library ranking it nineteenth among the century's novels and Time calling it the quintessential American picaresque.
The rest of the story is the great unfinished second act: Ellison worked on a successor for forty years, lost part of the manuscript in a house fire, and died in 1994 without completing it; Juneteenth and the fuller Three Days Before the Shooting were assembled posthumously. He published two essay collections meanwhile, and his one finished novel has outlasted every fashion that questioned it, sitting on syllabuses beside the protest fiction it deliberately refused to be.