Rating: 
Summary: Lengthy Novel is a Surprising Delight
Review: I must confess. I was more than a little disappointed when I discovered the copy of The Invisible Man on my 11th grade reading list was authored by Ralph Ellison not H.G. Wells. Once I stopped complaining about the extra four hundred pages and started reading the book however I found it an intriguing complex work that not only supplemented my Advanced Placement United States History class work on civil rights but also interested me.Ellison wove this highly descriptive story in the style of existentialism, mostly used by French authors of the twentieth century, as a way of questioning meaning of individual life in an entirely meaningless world. Ellison related this to racial issues between African Americans and whites. Ralph Ellison opens with the words, "I am an invisible man," then goes on to explain he is not a fictional creature of Poe's works or a Hollywood movie trick, but a living breathing human being that no one sees due to his skin tone. A highly emotional work, The Invisible Man reaches into the heart of the readers and cries for attention to be paid to the issues of race. Although this is not the 1800s in the core of racial discrimination, lynchings, and hate crimes, Diversity of race and the struggles of racial issues shaped America into the country we are today. Challenging thoughts on individuality and drawing attention to the heart of the problem with racial disturbances, The Invisible Man is a classic work that although quite lengthy has a solid heart of excellent plot development, descriptive writing, strong emotions and challenging themes.
Rating: 
Summary: Silent Racism
Review: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is the most powerful description of the modern African-American experience on record. It follows the life of a nameless protangonist as he journeys from a poor rural southern college to the streetes of Harlem. Thorughout out the book he is constantly unsure of himself and unable to find some place to belong. Each time he feels he has discovered someone who is truly color blind he finds that they are just out to use him for their own advantage. He is kicked out of his college when he shows a white benefactor, at his insistence, what life is like for poor rural blacks. When he goes north to New York, he is denied employment because of the "recommendations" his former college mentor is writing for him. He engages in Communist party rallies and human dog fights. Mostly he feels the isolation which comes from being alone in a crowd. As he makes his way through life he really does become an invisible man. Obviously not in the literal sense but in the way that someone who is constantly ignored or put on the fringes of society becomes an invisible man. He becomes invisible because of the quiet racism that pervades so much of Northern society in his day and which has continued down to the present.
Rating:
Summary: I choose to see him
Review: He is an invisible man, not that he is physically invisible, but because people refuse to see him as he is, or so the story starts. The story is about a youthful, unnamed black man, who starts off naive and full of idealism. Throughout the book, he faces different ordeals, transforms himself several times, and makes many discoveries about the society in which he lives, each time growing as an individual and trying to find his identity. The reason I liked this book so much because the way in which it was written makes you care about something you otherwise might not, let alone know about, how blacks weren't even paid attention to in the United States in the period before the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. They weren't so much oppressed or hated, but rather ignored altogether, which, when you think about it, is much worse. It shows just a taste of how much blacks have been wronged, by whites as well as blacks. It also helped my on my path to finding who I was, even though I am not black myself. The only thing I really disliked about this book was the slow pacing. In my opinion, the story could have been told in less detail and in less time, while still having the same effectiveness. This is a book that deals with racism and blacks in society, so know what you're getting into when you read it. Ellison uses a lot of Southern or uneducated diction, which can be confusing at times if you've never heard it spoken before. He also uses a lot of symbols, which I thought were well used and added greatly to the book. This great American novel, though quite lengthy at 500+ pages, is worth the read, even if you're like me and not really into that sort of stuff. I read this novel for an English class, so it was a close reading and I had to go back a lot, reread, and identify many things, things I wouldn't have noticed with just a casual reading. Everytime I went back and read something over, the book made more sense and I liked it more. Even though Ellison addresses many of the racial problems in America, and possibly inspired things to be done about them, many problems still exist today. Perhaps more people need to read it and be opened to another view of things.
Rating:
Summary: Not only a classic, but an entertaining one!
Review: Although I first read this novel, which was instantly recognized on its publication as a great book, as a teenager, I can't imagine that I understood the politics of the novel's second half, and wonder about assigning this book to high school students. There is no graphic sex or violence, but to understand cumulative disillusionments and disappointments seems to me to require experience few teenagers in America have. Be that as it may, this is at once a wise and a funny (mostly satiric, though two fight scenes approach slapstick) book. I enjoy as well as respect it. There is a lot to admire in Ellison's creation of characters and milieux and in his often exhilarating language and shifting style. (Ellison himself characterized it as moving from naturalism (à la Richard Wright) to expressionism to surrealism - though the Battle Royale seems already quite surrealist/absurdist to me.) I don't question that it is a great book, but great books (e.g., Moby Dick, The Charterhouse of Parma) are often not perfectly crafted books. The narrator strikes me as being a little too naive to have survived to junior year in college, so that there is some sense in Dr. Bledsoe's shock and irritation at having to give him Negro in the South 101 instruction. There are too many long speeches (in particular, I'd cut the blind speaker at a Founder's Day assembly) and the narrator seems oddly lacking in sexual desire of any sort -- though he experiences some of what Chester Himes referred to as the absurdities of being a black male with all the fantasies about black virility. The never-named narrator seems too numb too soon, and there is nowhere to go with the notion of invisibility once he falls down a rabbit hole (coal shoot) into his own private, brightly-lit wonderland.
Rating:
Summary: A Book That Will Haunt Your Quiet Times
Review: When I was 12 years old, my father brought home a trunk full of used books from a thrift store. In it was every book imaginable by the leading lights of the African-American literary pantheon. Baldwin, Hughes, Hurston, Wright, Fanon, Brown and of course the weightiest of the tomes at 600-plus pages, Ellison's Invisible Man. I read through all the slimmer volumes and never got around to Ellison until I was in college. Even after hearing all the hype about it for years on end, I was still floored by the book. It was the kind of book you backtrack while reading, retracing chapters you just read to see if the initial impact of the words was really that forceful. I empathized with the book and it's protagonist because having just gone through my early adolescence and teens I sensed his feeling of longing...and need for belonging. Nearing the end of the book, I slowed my pace, afraid of what I would find. After finishing it for many days (weeks, months...) afterward the book haunted my quiet times. It haunted me whenever I thought about it for years afterward. Thus, having just bought the "new" Ellison, "Juneteenth" I also bought the new commemorative "Invisible Man" and decided to read it again first. It was more powerful than before. It's tale of a search for identity in a land where your identity is denied rings even truer in this time of assimilation/balkanization. We live in a time where color-blindness (one form of invisibility) is the alleged goal while denial of recognition and privelege (the more prevalent form of invisibility) is still the unfortunate norm. Beyond being a book of the 50's and the civil rights era, it's even more important as a book for the move to a new millennium...where the lines demarking identity simultaneously harden and blur. And as to the reviewer who was puzzled about the lead character's display of leadership skills and potential while never seeming to live up to it, there is no need for puzzlement. From the teacher busted for drug-dealing, to the born-again pro-footballer busted on Super Bowl eve for solicitation to the present resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, this paradox is perhaps more the norm than we are willing to admit.
Rating:
Summary: The science of Nobodiness
Review: Ralph Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN tackles an issue that frankly is so huge and complex that you wouldn't think it could be captured in a single novel. However, Ralph Ellison pulls off the nearly impossible. Unlike other stories about the suppression/oppression of African-Americans which usually depict the protagonist as a victim of circumstance who is viewed as an enemy of the white people (read NATIVE SON), Ellison depicts the more real and punishing truth. That truth is that the African-American is hardly viewed at all by the white race. The African-American is unseen, his/her needs not addressed, his/her existence not acknowledged. This is a sentiment (if it can be called that) which is echoed in King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail". Ellison's nameless and blameless protagonist isn't viewed as a person by anyone. He is seen as a source of entertainment, or a source of athleticism, or a case to be tended to... anything except a human being. Ellison's story is devestating, and yet not fatalistic. The protagonist's continuing sense of decency, self-assertion (in his own way) and humanity is not squelched, even at the end. The fact that he bothers to tell his story indicates a hope for an audience to his drama. Perhaps there is hope for all of us.
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: I am writing this review to all those who overestimate Ellison as much as to those who underestimate him. I saw one post saying that "Ellison was the Muhammed Ali of fiction". I'm sorry but Ellison isn't even a top ten fiction author in the last century (Joyce, Orwell, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, James, Nabokov, Huxley, Forster, and Lawrence). That being said Invisible Man is still an incredible piece if fiction. Ellison's depiction of the black man's struggle across the racial divide in America is touching and true. Literature exists to artistically portray the nature of human behavior and emotion. Ellison does this well, and provides us with a powerfull and intelligent novel.
Rating:
Summary: As enthralling as it is provocative
Review: Ralph Ellison, for starters, exhibits a masterful command of the English language and all of its literary power from therein. For the neophytes reading this, Invisible Man is not merely "a book about overcoming racial injustice" -- as it would appear on the surface to many. To typecast this work in such a way would do nothing short of a grave disservice to the late Ellison. Invisible Man, contrarily, transcends mere race and delves into, as Ellison calls it, "the beautiful absurdity of the American identity." We are all aiding and abetting lies, Ellison says, by judging others in a coldly insular & scientifically calculated manner based solely upon one's outward appearance -- not unlike the The Brotherhood, Norton, Bledsoe, & Ras the Exhorter. As our hapless (and interestingly nameless), yet undeniably endearing, protagonist astutely states, "The truth is the light and light is the truth." As he is invisible without truth, the truth, conversely, is unattainable without light. Ellison takes us on a circuitous, if not tumultuous, road to self-awareness that is tragically achieved through his naive and idealistic dreams being systematically shattered by the irrepressibly cynical charlatans in whom he has put his unconditional trust such as the Iago-like Brother Jack. In a book where perception is anything but reality, Ellison's cryptic characters (such as Brother Jack and his inexplicable use of a foreign language and inscrutable glass eye as well as the ostensibly omnipresent, yet never present, Rinehart) without doubt add to this mysterious, yet pervasive, feeling of uncontrollable helplessness of our protagonist who is being inexorably jettisoned into a blurry chaotic world grossly devoid of right and wrong. Two FYIs: Appropriately, the only letters on the book cover which become "invisible" when looked at from a distance are the two I's. Also: read the prologue again after reading the entire book seeing, as Ellison succinctly states in both the prologue and epilogue, "The end was in the beginning and lies far ahead."
Rating:
Summary: The Greatest
Review: Ellison is the Muhammad Ali, the colossus of fiction - I have never experienced a work of art in ANY medium as rich, provocative and poignant as "Invisible Man." Bar none, be it painting, sculpture, theater, film, poetry... One of the best, most succinct ways I can think of relaying the impact of IM is the way we speak on the street, by saying: That's deep. Most of the "reviews" I've read here simply recount the many plot situations and/or entirely lack the depth to "get" what Ellison is doing as an artist and human being. For if nothing else, Ellison's work is unique in this respect: it reverberates on SO many levels to so many different kinds of people... Athletes have a way of talking about when they can do no wrong, when every shot goes in the basket, or the baseball looks as big as a watermelon - They say that they're "in the zone." THAT's what IM is. It's THE American story by an artist at the height of his powers, in the zone...
Rating: 
Summary: Invisible Man
Review: To be quite honest the book, "Invisible Man" was not what I expected. First, it's entirely too long, somewhat boring, a little confusing and terribly disturbing to me. I thought it was going to be mostly about a man isolating himself from the world. To my surprise the book is about a black man and the struggles he endures because of his race. There are many parts of this book that I found upsetting, one in particular is when the young man (narrator) is asked to deliver his speech, the one he had given at his graduation. This speech he must now deliver to some important white men, and ends up having to watch a nude women dance, then given clothes for the purpose of fighting blindfolded in a ring with other black kids. After being assaulted by these kids he has to fight a very large black boy who beats him. After that match the boys are paid with coins that are placed on an electric mat for the sole purpose of embarrassing the boys again in front of the white men. Finally, the boy is asked to deliver his speech which ends up being only a few drunk white men listening. Throughout this book, the Invisible Man goes through his life suffering because he will not conform to others expectations. By the end of the book he realized he will always have to struggle with the racial issue. Believing he will never be seen as the man he knows, he gives up and goes underground to become the Invisible Man. I will not recommend this book to anyone I know.
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