Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison - Book Report/Review Example

The Invisible Man Order No. 255817 No. of pages: 8 Premium 6530 The Invisible Man was the only novel written by Ralph Ellison, the grandson of slaves who was born to working class parents. Ellison trained as a musician from 1933 to 1936, at the Tuskegee Institute in Montgomery, Alabama, but a chance meeting with the writer Richard Wright moved him towards writing fiction. The Invisible Man is his only work, but its penetrating insights into the question of identity established his credentials as a deep thinker and a man who was interested in unraveling the tangled threads of racist identification. However, to treat the book as a treatise on the search for black identity would be to limit its scope, since it is “a very individual story, and more general, dramatizing the identity-crisis of a whole society.”(F.H. Langman). The period during which Ralph Ellison wrote this book was one of change and turbulence. The philosophy of existentialism was at the peak of its popularity and it sought to answer the reason for man’s existence in a universe bereft of meaning. Ellison placed his novel in the America, rising from the waste of the war, but looked at the problems of existence for the black community, whose presence is hardly acknowledged and the blindness of people to their plight. One of the most indispensable books written by Ira Berlin traces the destruction of the Blacks from the 17th to the 19th centuries, stating that this monstrous enterprise as Berlin calls it, was nothing but “Slavery of necessity, rested on force.” (Ira Berlin, 2003) Berlin illumines the changes of slavery that took place over time, critically analyzing such themes as “violence, power and labor.” (Ira Berlin, 2003) In his Colloquium on the book “A Country of Strangers” (David K. Shipler, 2001) he presented a collection of papers on the struggle between Blacks and Whites on racial profiling, the performing arts, as well as racism that was evident in American baseball. A very important aspect of the black identity was their music, and in this era of jazz and blues music, blacks carved a niche for themselves. Louis Armstrong, the greatest exponent of jazz, hovers in the background of the novel, and his song about the trials and tribulations of blacks-“(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” is a constant refrain in the narrators life. This song highlights the inherent conflict between a white and black society as well as the struggle for recognition on the part of the blacks. The classic Invisible Man has a cast that is not only complex but extremely colorful. The protagonist of the novel is on a quest to find both identity and meaning and serves to move the story in a literal as well as symbolic fashion. The other characters in the play are quite ordinary and mundane but their significance is brought out because of the manner in which the narrator chooses to view them. Though Ralph Waldo Ellison always considers himself to be a college drop out, yet he was presented with 12 honorary doctorate degrees from highly prestigious universities such as Tuskegee Institute, Harvard University, University of Michigan and Rutgers University. Character Analysis The Narrator (the “Invisible Man”)     The narrator is a misguided, youth who clearly represents or portrays the classic naïve young man. whose main quest is his search for meaning and identity of a black man in the white society of America. Throughout the novel he appears nameless and invisible inspite of having a proper name. The narrator is also considered to be a “mis- educated Negro” because having learned a white washed version of American history does not seem to recognize the selfless contributions made by the Black Americans and hence thinks nothing of despising them. The myth of Black supremacy is an accepted fact to him and he feels highly superior to his uneducated Black counterparts and distances himself from them. He fells terribly disillusioned at the fact that Bledsoe whom he had idolized and trusted so much had betrayed him badly by ruining his opportunity of acquiring a good college education and thereby a much better life. Bledsoe’s letters that he chanced upon, prove devastating and incites him to throw insulting remarks like, “chitterling eater.” He miserably lacks a clear cut sense of identity and a true system of values and therefore does not have the backbone to stand up for himself and question any atrocity done to him because he believes that Bledsoe and Norton control his life and fate. But this condition is short lived as gradually he progresses from blind ignorance to an unspeakable awareness as he listens to everything with an open mind and is able to assimilate the right connections between his life and his experiences with others. His grandfather reflects the ancestral shadow of slavery that even to this day seems to haunt all the African Americans. However, he tells the narrator that he is a traitor to their race and therefore his spirit continues to manifest itself through the advice and guidance given by other Black individuals. Dr. A. Herbert Bledsoe Dr. Bledsoe was the president of the black college which had been established by its Founder. The duty he was entrusted with was to satisfy the legacy of the Founder’s dream, which was to lift the veil of ignorance from all his people. On the other hand, Dr. Bledsoe promotes himself with his cunning and selfish interests and thus destroys this dream. He was famously known as “Old Buckethead” to his students because he loved reciting the famous speech of the Founder titled “Cast Down Your Bucket.” He is an indispensable character and has a pivotal role to play, in ejecting the narrator in the harsh and callous world of reality from his idyllic surroundings. He is also the person responsible in meting out a false sense of security and according to Ellison he is the kind of dangerous character who is a detrimental tool to the progress of the Blacks. Dr. Bledsoe is depicted as a negative character who is a great schemer and dishonest to the point of great betrayal. He is a figure of sheer ruthlessness and is a threat to stability of any kind. He is also willing to sacrifice his community for his thirst for power. He is such a self- centered character whose concern is only for his personal interests. Symbols in the Novel Ralph Ellison considers novels to be “time – haunted” and affirms that The Invisible Man is a imitative of historical events In order to understand the symbolism in the novel it is necessary to understand the historical context of the references. Ralph Ellison had covered the Harlem uprising of 1943, for the New York Post and some of the symbols in the novel gain significance when studied in this context. (College English (September 1997) The identity of the protagonist and his role in society is dictated by those around him who keep him running a reality borne out by the Bledsoe letter which asked the receiver of the letter to basically keep the hero running from post to post. What the hero believes is a letter of recommendation, is a warning to employers. This refers to the custom of slaveholders sending slaves running around the countryside on flimsy jobs, but it is a greater indictment of the Jim Crow South and the supposedly emancipated North where whites tried to suppress blacks. (College English (September 1997) The song by Louis Armstrong highlights the inherent conflict between white and black society as well as the struggle for recognition on the part of the blacks. The Invisible Man has been called the “Moby Dick of racial crisis” (Corry , John) Themes in the novel – Black Identity The themes that we find in a literary work are often an idea that is universal in nature and fundamental to humanity in general. In this book the author has dealt with the issue of racism and the struggle of a black American in search of his identity. The narrator of Invisible Man is shown as an individual who finds it difficult to establish his identity as he is an African American living in racist America. In all his endeavors to find his identity he is shown passing through different communities each having their own notions of how an African American ought to behave. The values and expectations imposed upon him are a detriment to his growth as an individual. With the imposition of prescribed roles he finds himself to be playing an inauthentic role of a human whose complexity is limited.  The narrator becomes a member of the workforce at Liberty Paints on reaching New York. Here he finds himself involved in a process whereby he realizes that the Whites are dependent on the Blacks for their work. In spite of such reality the Blacks working in the factory are not acknowledged and this makes the narrator feel stifled. A ray of hope in the form of the Brotherhood proves to be a disappointment. The narrator thought that he would be able to fight for racial equality within the ideology of the organization. This does not happen as they use him as a token black man in their abstract project. Blindness The other prominent theme in the novel is blindness. The narrator feels that he is like an invisible man because people around him do not see him as he really is. They want to see him fit in their frame of things thereby effectively negating his individuality and identity. The world to him is filled with blind men who do not want to see his true nature. He behaves in a way that people want him to and this makes him unable to act according to his true nature. Initially he tries to be the invisible person people want him to be but in the end he finds this tactic very passive. In the end he decides to come out as a complex individual. He wanted to force people to acknowledge his true existence outside of the imposition of society. Another aspect highlighted by the author is the limitations of ideology. During the course of the novel the narrator realizes that human complexities are limited in their development due to racism and general ideologies. The ideologies propounded by institutions were too simplistic to enhance the development of multidimensional human identity. The novel conveys that life is very rich and unpredictable which like jazz reaches heights of beauty during moments of surprise and improvisation. The major themes of the novel are thus developed by the motifs of blindness and invisibility. The recurrent symbols on the other hand used to represent abstract ideas are the coin bank in the shape of the grinning black man (Chapter Fifteen) and Tod Cliftons dancing Sambo doll (Chapter Twenty). The major themes of the novels are developed by the motifs of blindness and invisibility. Blindness is used as a tool to portray people’s willful avoidance to acknowledge and confront the truth. Another type of blindness in the book is the refusal of people to acknowledge truth about their community and themselves.   The theme of invisibility pervades the novel and it is juxtaposed with blindness as one person becomes invisible due to another person’s blindness. Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” was a great milestone in American Literature and ever since its appearance in 1952 it continues to enthrall its readers as well as its audiences all over the world. This book established Ellison as one of the most distinguished writers of the century after it won him the ‘National Book Award’ for best fiction. (Random House, 1995) This novel has been made into a number of movies that made the novel all the more famous. Ellison never favored the role of being a representative for his race, but he preferred maintaining that he pursued the art instead of racial justice. He worked tirelessly on his second novel for forty years but never got to finishing it. After his death, on 16th April, 1994, his friend John Callahan edited the novel and in 1999 it was published with the title “Juneteenth.” Ellison is well know both nationally and internationally as ne of America’s most prolific writers who lived up to his great potential by presenting himself as a great literary figure to others who followed in his footsteps. References Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. David K. Shipler Colloquium on Race, and Terry White. Blacks and Whites Meeting in America: Eighteen Essays on Race. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co, 2003. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952. Invisible Man Book Notes Summary by Ralph Ellison Book Notes Summary http://www.bookrags.com/notes/inv/BIO.htm Ralph Waldo Ellison www.aalbc.com/authors/ellison.htm Ralph Ellison: Biography www.answers.com/topic/ralph-ellison Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man- The Rhetoric of Anticommunism http://victorian.fortunecity.com/holbein/439/bf/rhetoric_of_anticommunism.html http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/kaiser-on-ellison.html http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/corry-on-ellison.html http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/bellow-on-ellison.html SparkNotes: Invisible Man http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/invisibleman/section1.html Read More