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An Introduction to…. Invisible Man!. Visible M e !. The first thing you need to know: I love this book. “Invisible Man: Ralph Ellison Memorial” statue at Riverstone Park and 150 th Street in the Harlem section of Upper Manhattan, NYC. Ralph Ellison lived opposite the park.
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Invisible Man! Visible Me! The first thing you need to know: I love this book. “Invisible Man: Ralph Ellison Memorial” statue at Riverstone Park and 150th Street in the Harlem section of Upper Manhattan, NYC. Ralph Ellison lived opposite the park.
H.G. Wells’ 1897 science fiction novella about an actual invisible man The second thing you need to know: This is a different book.
Ralph Ellison: 1914-1994 Our book was written by this guy…
“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.” The reason that Ellison’s protagonist is invisible…
Ralph Ellison: A Few Facts • Full name: Ralph Waldo Ellison (named after Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson) • Raised in Oklahoma City, OK • 1933: Entered Tuskegee Institute on a music scholarship • Moved to New York City after his junior year in college to study visual arts, but ended up writing • Cites T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as an important influence on his literary career • 1947-1951: Wrote Invisible Man • 1952: Invisible Man published (only novel of Ellison’s published during his lifetime) • Ellison was also a professor at Bard College, Rutgers University, and Yale University
Invisible Man:The Great American Novel? “Ellison … created far more than a commentary on race. He … attempted to decipher the cruel AND beautifulparadox that is America, a country founded on high ideals AND cold-blooded betrayals.” – Random House Publishers
“[W]e were to affirm the principle on which the country was built and not the men … the principle was greater than the men.” – Invisible Man, Epilogue
The Paradoxical American Dream Like most classic works of American literature, Invisible Man explores the TENSION inherent in the notion of the American Dream as well as the COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP between the INDIVIDUAL and SOCIETY.
One of the protagonist’s key lessons to be learned is summed up by a street vendor in Ch. 13: “Everything what looks good ain’t necessarily good.” The protagonist has to learn not to put BLIND faith in people, organizations, or ideologies.
Invisible Man asPicaresque Novel Ellison uses the structure of the picaresque novel in order to offer an ironic and satirical look at the hypocrisy and corruption in American society…
Invisible Man asPicaresque Novel As such, he sends his naive hero plunging through almost every stratum of this divided society…
Invisible Man asPicaresque Novel …from an ivy-covered college in the deep South to the streets of Harlem…
Invisible Man asPicaresque Novel …from a sharecropper’s shack to the floor of a hellish paint factory…
Invisible Man asPicaresque Novel … from a millionaire’s cocktail party to a Communist rally…
Invisible Man asPicaresque Novel …from church jubilees to street riots.
Diverse America = Diverse Diction “In his prose, Ellison managed to encompass the entirety of the American language—BLACK and WHITE, HIGH-BROW and LOW-DOWN, MUSICAL, RELIGIOUS, and JIVEY—and reshape it to his own ends. In Invisible Man he created one of those rare works that is a world unto itself, a book that illuminates our own in ways that are at once HILARIOUS and DEVASTATING.” – Random House Publishers
Multi-Genre Novel Invisible Man can be classified in numerous ways: • PICARESQUE NOVEL • GOTHIC NOVEL • QUEST NOVEL • BILDUNGSROMAN • KUNTSLERROMAN • PROPAGANDA NOVEL • FRAME NARRATIVE • EPIC NOVEL (THINK OF IT AS AN AMERICAN ODYSSEY) • AFRICAN-AMERICAN MIGRATION NARRATIVE (SLAVE NARRATIVE/ASCENSION NARRATIVE/IMMERSION NARRATIVE)
And let’s not forget… It has appeared on the AP Exam more than any other text: 1976 1977 1978 1982 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1994 1995 1996 1997 2001 2003 2004 2005 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
To prepare yourself to write knowledgably about this text, you need to immerse yourself in at least 1 (if not more) of its 10 major MOTIFS…
“But what did I do to be so blue? Bear with me…” - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, Prologue
