Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison, 1952
581 pp.
Book Review by Molly Lundquist
October, 2014
One of the great American coming-of-age novels, Ellison's Invisible Man is the story of a young black man struggling to find his identity in white society.
The book was an immediate standout—critics and readers loved (and still do) it's rich variety of prose styles, its humor, imagery, and symbols. Yet its portrait of America is hardly flattering. The book was one of the first fictional works, and perhaps most widely read, to focus attention on the country's virulent racism—without the consoling sentimentality of an Uncle Tom's Cabin.
A somewhat older narrator tells us, right in the opening sentence, that he is invisible—not physically, but in the sense that others see through him, defining him for their own purposes. He then takes us on a retrospective journey from adolescence to adulthood. Like all such journeys, this one begins in naivete and passes through disenchantment, even despair, before landing at self-knowledge.
Rasied in Mississippi, the young narrator attends the state college for Negroes, a stand-in for Tuskegee Institute. From there he goes to New York City where his adventures, and misadventures, eventually culminate in the Harlem race riot of 1935.
Along the way, the narrator—who remains nameless—allows himself to be acted upon by others, a trait that lands him in trouble over and over. Through it all, the narrator remains haunted by his grandfather's dying words:
I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country.... Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree em to death and destruction....
Our young hero doesn't know how to interpret those words. Was his grandfather a traitor to the white race because his obsequious "yeses" and "grins" were purely manipulative? Or was he a traitor to his own race because his obsequiousness was genuine? It takes years—the entire book—before he feels ready to answer that question. And therein lies self-knowledge.
Invisible Man is a true American classic and named a "Book of the Century" by the New York Times the year it was published. Though dense and at times overwritten, it's a gripping read.
See our Reading Guide for Invisible Man.