We
rely, in this world, on the visual aspects of humanity as a means of
learning who we are. This, Ralph Ellison argues convincingly, is a
dangerous habit. A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952,
Invisible Man chronicles the travels of its narrator, a young,
nameless black man, as he moves through the hellish levels of
American intolerance and cultural blindness. Searching for a context
in which to know himself, he exists in a very peculiar state. "I
am an invisible man," he says in his prologue. "When they approach me
they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their
imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me." But this is
hard-won self-knowledge, earned over the course of many years.
As the book gets started, the
narrator is expelled from his Southern Negro college for
inadvertently showing a white trustee the reality of black life in
the south, including an incestuous farmer and a rural whorehouse. The
college director chastises him: "Why, the dumbest black bastard in
the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to
tell him a lie! What kind of an education are you getting around
here?" Mystified, the narrator moves north to New York City, where the
truth, at least as he perceives it, is dealt another blow when he
learns that his former headmaster's recommendation letters are, in
fact, letters of condemnation.
What ensues is a search for
what truth actually is, which proves to be supremely elusive. The
narrator becomes a spokesman for a mixed-race band of social
activists called "The Brotherhood" and believes he is fighting for
equality. Once again, he realizes he's been duped into believing what
he thought was the truth, when in fact it is only another variation.
Of the Brothers, he eventually discerns: "They were blind, bat
blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their voices. And because
they were blind they would destroy themselves.... Here I thought
they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference,
when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see
either color or men."
Invisible Man is
certainly a book about race in America, and sadly enough, few of
the problems it chronicles have disappeared even now. But Ellison's
first novel transcends such a narrow definition. It's also a book
about the human race stumbling down the path to identity, challenged
and successful to varying degrees. None of us can ever be sure of the
truth beyond ourselves, and possibly not even there. The world is a
tricky place, and no one knows this better than the invisible man,
who leaves us with these chilling, provocative words: "And it is
this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower
frequencies, I speak for you?" --Melanie Rehak
