Invisible Man | 
| Author: Ralph Ellison
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  277 reviews
Sales Rank: 808
Media: Paperback
Edition: 2
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 608
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0679732764
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780679732761
ASIN: 0679732764
Publication Date: March 14, 1995
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Some wear on a very usable copy - marks
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Amazon.com
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
Product Description
Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952.A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century.The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 272 more reviews...
 Completely Unique July 16, 2008
Invisible Man / 0-679-73276-4
Ellison's master work is breathtaking, indescribable, and completely unique. This long and careful allegory of the young black man making his way through the white world is filled with passages so crammed with myth and meaning that the closest comparison I can make is to Rushdie's carefully disjointed Satanic Verses.
Simple incidents, such as Mr. Norton's introduction to Jim Trueblood are complex and fascinating. Trueblood has accidentally (or so he claims, - can we believe his impossible dream?) impregnated his own daughter, and now his daughter and wife are both pregnant at once. The lurid incident has resulted in Trueblood becoming a cause celebre for the white community - they hang on the lurid details, lap up the story again and again with prurient interest, and hold him up as justification for the doctrine of black inferiority.
Yet Mr. Norton's reaction to all this is a sort of disbelieving panic. He begs Trueblood to know why he is celebrated for this terrible thing, when others would be shunned. He takes great pity on the man, giving him monetary compensation for the horrible 'ordeal' he has been through. But something does not sit right, and Mr. Norton's interest seems very personal. He has mentioned that he had a daughter, and that something terrible had occurred to her. And we know that child molestation is not confined to the poor. Is it possible that...? And is Ellison suggesting that what a rich white man may hide, a poor black man cannot? Can we consider that what a rich white woman may chose to overlook, a poor black woman may not (as she has less money and social standing to 'lose' over the scandal)? Dare we wonder that a rich white girl can be sent away for private 'school' to bear a child in secret or get an abortion, when a poor black girl has only the option to shoulder on through the pregnancy?
It is the power of Invisible Man that these, and many other questions, are never answered - indeed, they are never even explicitly raised. But the nuanced narrative nudges them into our minds and, once there, we cannot let go of them.
Underappreciated work of genius June 21, 2008
This is book is far to good to be filed in one category, and unfortunately categorization is probably hurting the range of it's audience. What we have here is a great tome of African American literature to be sure, but the work far transends ethnicities in the importance of it's message and the social commentary found within. Granted it is about a young African American male trying to gain recognician as a man, if nothing else, in a society where identity [...] merely a fascade for social and professional purposes. This book is as well written and more developed than many of the existentialist literature spoon fed to us in school. I have to admit I felt a bit cheated that I stumbled on this book accidentally in the Black History section of a book store, sandwiched between Douglas and King.
Anyone who has opted to form their own opinions and maintain the integrity of their own values will find this a very satisfying read.
 Too many words and too little coherent plot June 12, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
This novel seems to be just one big blurb that is trying to be expressed by as many words as possible. Things that could be summed up in a few words can take pages and pages to dictate. This makes the presentation awfully muddy and hard to follow.
At one point he's boxing , part of an explosion at a paint factory, has a lobotomy performed on himself, and so on and so forth to more ridiculous events that build on one another. This book just lacked any flow or pace since the events became even more outrageous, jumped around from one thing to the next, then used 10 pages too many to describe each event.
These flaws prevented me from realizing the themes the author was trying to cultivate. It seems that he wanted to make a book that encapsulated every walk of African-American life during this time period: college educated, field workers, those still under control of slavery, those under command of the whites, those in unions, those who work, those in Harlem, those in cities, those who are homeless, those who are crazy, those in organizations, those in the South. No wonder such a mountainous project did not come out coherently; the scope of it was too large to dictate successfully.
 Invisible Man May 31, 2008
This is an important book in the sense it sheds light on the trials and tribulations of an educated black man in the mid 1900s. Not my favorite piece of literature, but it was well worth my time and was easy to read.
Quiet Rage Turned into High Art April 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This novel, a model of creative writing, describes what it is like to land in a big city and then be sucked up into the black hole of urban life in America. It is a story told by a black man coming of age in the mid-1940s, and thus is about black anonymity in a white world. But one of the primary strengths of the novel is that its "meta-messages" are all about anonymity and thus makes it universal and applicable equally to any race and even to any urban culture.
It is existential in the sense that it is as much about cultural alienation in a modern world as it is about how to confront the barbaric social rules of a racist American culture. However, race is only one of the many themes in a subtext rich and textured with many sub-themes. Fear, distrust, betrayal, treachery, coming of age, and being invisible in plan sight, are just some of the other themes that run on parallel tracks in the subtext.
The story itself is a rather complex, if not altogether tortuous and improbable plot, betraying an otherwise cleanly written and logical structure. It seems to have been "jerry-rigged" to assist in the convergence of, and the resolution of, the many disparate threads and themes. That he pulled them all together in the end is itself no small technical feat, and probably accounts for the books inordinate length.
The author speaks in the (invisible) voice of the first person, leaving as few emotional clues as possible -- under the set of literary and emotional rules that he operates under and exploits. Other reviewers have compared his use of these devices to those used by Dostoyevski in his "Notes From the Underground," which is one of my favorite novels, and although I cannot disagree with these reviewers interpretations, I prefer to compare them with those used in Kafka's "The Trial." I believe the tensions created, and the way the novel is finally resolved, as well as the way he exploits the idea of being constantly controlled by larger forces, are equally palpable in both novels.
As for the issue of race, the highest marks must be given to Ellison both for his craft and for his artistic temperament, for not succumbing to a direct attack on American racism, using instead an oblique attack. Not that a direct attack was not a requirement of the times, but that it would have been viewed as being too angry, or too bitter. Quiet, sublimated rage worked much better, and as an unintended bonus, successfully linked all of the sub-themes up into another orbit of humanity. This was all to the good.
Among other things, this novel proves that good writing calls on all of one's inner strengths resources, as well as on ones talents.
Five stars.
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