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Summary: Still Relevant Today
Review: The Autobiography of Malcolm X meets Chris Rock. Funny, insightful journey of disillusionment by a young black man. When reading it, you can see the influence it has had, because many things you thought were current wisdom, Mr. Ellison touched upon fifty years ago. A good read. Still relevant today, of course.
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Summary: sturggle indeed
Review: A great tale of struggle and hardship that one and all can come away from gaining. The prologue and epilogue are for the philosophy types while lit kiddies can dive into the middle. Go for it 'cause this is the only text the Ellison completed.
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Summary: Black is beautiful but invisible in white light
Review: Ralph Ellison is a completely new generation of black literature. When I put this book on the syllabus of English Literature at the University of California in 1973, Fall quarter, it was the first time a novel by a black author was thus proposed to the wide public of the university (English III, Initiation to English Lieterature). I chose it because it is a book that goes beyond pure racial concerns and reaches a higher level. It is based on a « white » metaphor : the White House, a plant producing white paint, in short a whole metaphor about being whitewashed and brainwashed. This comes to the concept of invisibility. It appears in a Harlem riot. A black man is unseen by his white fellow citizens. Either completely, so he has no existence whatsoever, or partially and he is only seen within a « white » frame of mind and of existence. To be seen the black man must be white (in behaviour, in personality, etc), i.e. must conform to a stereotype that fits in white ideology, which of course justifies any kind of segregation. But the best of all vision in the book is the confrontation of the hero with the black general secretary of the Communist Party of theUS. This man has only one eye and the other eye is made of glass, and the confrontation is centered on the dropping of this glass eye into a plain drinlking glass. This man, who is black, who is a revolutionary, who wants things to be changed (in a stalinist way, maybe, but changed nevertheless) has a one-eyed vision of the world and he becomes the symbol of all politicians who can only see what they have decided to see, who can only have, due to there partisanship, a one-sided, hence biassed, vision. It is an allusion to the « two »-party system. It is an allusion to the division of Congress in two bodies : the Senate and the House of Representatives. It is an allusion to the division between Congress and the White House, to the division between the Federal Government and the States' governments, to the division between Congress and the states' legislatures, etc. The US is a dual system but anyone standing anywhere can only have a one-eyed vision, or at best several one-eyed visions that are contradictory and hence never brought together. So the end of the book is a metaphor of roots for the Blacks: underground in a cellar, a black coal cellar, entirely illuminated with white electric light, hundreds of white electric lights to make things and the hero visible, but in an egocentric cocoon that is centered on the black man himself. No one can see him. We are of course in 1952, before the Civil Rights Movement, before Martin Luther King, and many others, before the Black Nationalist Movement, the Black Culturalist Movement, the Black Panther Party, etc. These movements are going to make Afro-Americans visible, especially with the help of the media. These movements are going to highlight the invisible violence the Blacks were the victims of, and make this violence regress. But the new strategy, and it is contained in the book already, of white society will be to divert white violence into the black community so it became black violence against blacks, a self-destructing violence meaning that the whites can wash their hands of it. That is the meaning of the riot that destroys Harlem, but with fire and violence coming from the blacks themselves : they destroy their own community because they see it as a symbol of their being rejected and their being submitted to segregation. In other words it is a reaction without a dream. There is no dream. The black hero is trapped in his white-electrically-illuminated black-coal-cellar, entirely closed-up onto himself with no dream about the future of the American society as a whole, blacks and whites included, all minorities included. There is no hope at the end of this book and that is why it is the most hopeful and positive book on black condition in America, and it is still absolutely valid. Just ask Angela Davis what it means. She knows, with her Rainbow Alliance, she knows with her being expelled from the CPUS because she was supporting Gorbatchev, that is to say the end of the Cold War, that is to say the end of a one-eyed vision on each side of the divide between the two camps, though each side was looking at the world from a different eye. And this book also contains a vision of what may happen, or may be happening : white America being too ruthless in its vision and domination of a post-cold-war-world will recreate the divide...
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Summary: A Difficult Book, Yet Beautifully Written
Review: In my many years of reading, I have never come across a book that was written as well as Invisible Man. Although the prose and the language used by Ellison is extremely difficult, it paints a picture so vivid, you think you are actually in the book. It is a striking portrayal of what life was like for people like the main character. It was simply a horrific thing to experience, yet the genius of Ellison has somehow put it into writing.
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Summary: Simply a living masterpiece
Review: "Stephen's task, like ours, was not in creating the uncreated aspects of his race, but of discovering the undiscovered features of his face. Our task is in making ourselves individuals. The conscience of a race is the conscience of its individuals who see, evaluate, record... we create the race by creating ourselves, and to our astonishment we would have created something far more important: we would have created a culture. Why waste time creating a conscience for something that does not exist? For you see, blood and skin do not think!" Ralph Ellison, INVISIBLE MAN This book is a treasure. This book is filled with all the elements of masterful storytelling, mythic-level subtext and spellbinding events, psychological depth, multi-dimensional characters and characterizations... it will be patently impossible for you to put it down once you have picked it up. I somehow found a way to avoid this book in high school and college- partly, I'm sure, because it became so fashionable to have a timely opinion on its social relevance that it made not having read it seem subhuman, while simultaneously making the act of reading it seem like an inhumanly boring chore. Thank God the spirit of excellence and truth kept calling me to this book. This one book does for the human soul what the authors of most of the last ten plus years of self-help books, sociological tomes, racial dialogues and popular novels COMBINED have both endeavored to do and practically proclaim could not actually be done in print. I came away from this book feeling rejuvenated, stunned, inspired, engaged, taught, challenged, exhilarated, simultaneously filled with both hope and despair- and never at any time did I stop feeling entertained. I not only felt what the character went through, but the sick side of humanity and how it fought the good in every human being he came across, in an insane, insane world that renders human beings, "invisible". Ralph Ellison was from the school of writers who endeavored not just to write good, timely books but epic myth/epistles of the human condition wrapped up in the pains, sicknesses and triumphs of the present day experience. He didn't try to write a Black book; he tried to write a human book, about the spirit IN a Black man. He did it. He achieved it. He wrote THE book with this, and made our world that much better. You will enjoy this book immensely.
Rating: 
Summary: Dated, Rambling, & Slow
Review: This could be a good book if it was condensed. This is something I would seldom recommend yet in this book I think it is a must. The reason is that the story keeps getting side tracked with lengthy preaching and oratory that does more to turn me off than to inform me.
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Summary: Ellison Evokes
Review: I originally read this superb book back in my High School days. Required reading and all. And recently rediscoverd Mr. Ellison's masterpiece when my oldest son was raving to me about the book he HAD to read! In "Invisible Man", we never actually know the narrator...he is invisible in name, but, in bringing us his nightmarish journey cross racial divides, he is very high profile. We travel with him from the Deep South to the ravaged streets of Harlem. Where men are men and African American men are reduced to fighting animals to survive. Reading this profound tome again, I have renewed my faith as well as my fright of human behavior. An excellent book to read, share and remember. Thanks--CDS
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Summary: his Invisibility makes us question our own significance
Review: The prologue to this Ellison masterpiece introduces us to his concept of invisibility. Then we the readers are able to trace the journey of a nameless Southern Black who journeys North to come to the dramatic realization that his work for equality is futile as is his general quest or purpose in life.
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Summary: You read The Cliff notes, now read the book
Review: High school ruins so many books for us. Don't let this be one of them. This is a powerful book about the black experience in America that everyone should read, no matter the color of their skin. Not only does it stand the test of time, it's perhaps even more relevant today.
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Summary: The Invisible Man
Review: This was an excellent book. Unfortunately, from what I have seen, it is not very well known. "The Inivisible Man" says alot about the times in the 40's and 50's and sends a strong message against racism. I think this would make an excellent book for teaching in schools.
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