"Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison: An Uncomfortable Read But It Gets Better

"They were me; they defined me. I was my experiences and my experiences were me, and no blind men, no matter how powerful they became, even if they conquered the world could take that, or change one single itch, taunt, laugh, cry, scar, ache, rage or pain of it."

If one were to retell the plot of the Invisible Man, on the surface it has much in common with Richard Wright's autobiographical Black Boy. A young black man flees the south and moves to a big city in the North in the first half of the 1930s, where he becomes involved in a communist party or brotherhood. Yet, there is a striking difference between the story of the very real Wright and the main character in Invisible Man whose names the reader is never privy too - Wright sees what the white reader does not, whereas the modern white reader of the Invisible Man sees what the narrator does not.

Invisible Man takes the reader inside a young man's journey towards disillusionment. Due to the naivety and inexperience of the character who begins the novel as a fresh out of high school, college graduate, Ellison's novel reads like a Jordan Peele horror story with his grandfather's last words setting the stage, "...our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days.." The yearning to see this character come out whole and aware kept me reading through early chapters filled with violence, though I did so with an anxiety that had me wanting to shout, "Get out!" In this way the reader is in it with the character who accepts being a part of a battle royal and suffers through electrocution out of ambition and a belief that the reward of opportunity will be worth the pain of dehumanization. The surprise is that to some extent his obedience does in fact pay off with a scholarship. His humanity is broken down and then that submission awarded.

From the beginning the narrator embraces and pontificates on the wisdom of the white man and their guidance, sees pleasing them as the key to his own success, even when the evidence in front of him reveals the base actions of the leaders in his community. Not a particularly likable character in Chapter One because of his acceptance of the doctrine that the ends justify the means, the wiser, more jaded narrator of the prologue gives the reader hope he will throw off these shackles.

I wonder whether I would have experienced this journey differently reading this story had I been a young teenager reading it in the 1950s, but as a woman in my 40s in 2024, the characters blind trust in authority and acceptance of the doctrines he's been taught feels like a serial killer with a knife just behind the corner. The youth is pushed through his life like a pawn on a chess board and the more one reads, the more one concurs that sometimes the best path in this terrifying world is to live outside of it, invisible, if lonely.

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