Invisible Man was on a list of "100 Significant Books" I was working through, and is considered one of the great novels of the 20th Century, not just one of the great American or African-African works. I've heard Ellison described as the "Black Joyce" which is rather unfair to Ellison--both because he's his own man, and because his novel is much more readable and enjoyable than Joyce's Ulysses, also on that list. The theme is stated right in the beginning, in one of the most eloquent openings I've read in literature:
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me.
That's from the Prologue. The first chapter sets the tone for the novel: surreal, brutal, disturbing. In it and developed throughout is this conception of the Booker T Washington vision of how to respond to racism as treason to self and to race. I can't help but feel Ellison is unfair to Booker T. Washington and his legacy, particularly in how he depicts his fictional counterpart Bledsoe, but I can't deny the power of Ellison's imagery and language, and it's fascinating in its way how this novel written in the late 1940s and published in 1952 is still relevant today. I can hear so many echos in it that reflect racial divides--not so much in terms of black and white but more the black versus black debates: W.E.B. DuBois versus Booker T. Washington; Shelby Steele versus Cornell West. And despite all I've read before on the period, I do feel the book made me better understand why both the Communist Party and Black Nationalism might have appealed in the first half of the 20th century to American blacks frustrated over their treatment by their fellow Americans.
Not everything about the novel works for me however. So many of the incidents in the book are too bizarre to be taken as real, I found it off-putting at times and it made it harder to feel for his narrator and take what happens to him seriously. For one because I didn't feel they all fit together with the narrative and narrator--they feel episodic, rather than part of an arc for his character. There's something here that makes me think more of Kafka, where every character and scene is pregnant with symbolism. Ten months pregnant--with triplets. Sometimes I thought the racial imagery and handling of issues were very heavy handed. (Optic white paint, "the right white?" Really?) And I never identified and rarely sympathized with Ellison's unnamed "invisible man." At times, and not just at the beginning, he's just too naive and foolish to be believed, such a tool, even for someone that young. He changes so much to fit those he's around, is such a chameleon, that seems more the explanation for being "invisible" than the color of his skin. (Even if I get Ellison's point he is a chameleon because of racism.) He even allows his own name to be effaced at one point and at another wears a disguise. One of the few times he exerts himself as an individual is when he chooses to buy yams from a street vendor and eat them right there. Few of the characters outside the narrator ever seemed real to me, especially the female characters. It doesn't help that so much of Ellison's dialogue comes across as, if not stilted, than at least stagey and filled with stock phrases. The Epilogue just doesn't work for me. It's as eloquent as the prologue, but didn't convince me it linked up with the narrator's experiences. On the other hand, there is a streak of humor through the book I couldn't help appreciating. (I loved Ellison's description of his character's first encounter with the New York City subway system--over fifty years later, and the description is still apt.)
But you know, on that list of "100 Significant Books," this one is the only one by an African-American, and often seems mentioned as the book to read in that category. I did like Invisible Man a lot, but I wouldn't consider it as amazing a read as Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Toni Morrison's Beloved or especially Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. All of those books have characters I cared about much more than Ellison's narrator. On the other hand, not only was this a surprisingly fast-paced read, but many of the scenes, despite of or because they're so bizarre, are definitely very memorable and likely to stay with me a long time. And that's why for all the problems I had with it I rated it four stars. Very much worth the read.
