Invisible Man

Rating:
Summary: An insightful, provocative, tough read-- but well worth it.
Review: This book is a mine: deep, dark, treacherous, but still full of its own rewards. Invisible Man is not merely a book, it is one of those rare gifts to humanity-- a collection of insights are so profound, they shake you to the very core. The novel is the journey of the unnamed narrator-- the invisible man-- and how a segregated America mired in bigotry enslaves both black and white, eclipsing the narrator's identity, whether in de facto slavery of the South, or through the exhaultation in Communist rallies. That it still rings truth almost 50 years after its publication is both a testiment to its brilliance, and perhaps a sad statement on the state of race relations in America today

Rating:
Summary: Wasn't Good At All!!
Review: I had to read this book for school. I hated this book with a passion. I didn't like the main character. I also didn't like the fact that he didn't have a name. My teacher told us that he didn't have a name because Ellison wanted him to be universal. I mean it is hard to believe that it took all those hardships for him to 'find' himself. Is anyone that naive. I hope not. I would have wised up after Dr. Bledsoe lied about the letters of reccomendation!!! This wasn't a very good book at all in my opinion

Rating:
Summary: The Great American Novel - Revisited
Review: Ralph Ellison crafted, for seven years, one of the superb novels America has ever seen. His stylish prose and Dostoevsky like insight into the human psyche give his characters a rare depth. The nameless protagonist gives us his life in words and the adventure is as varying as the landscapes Ellison paints; from a stint at a black college for the promising young man to the Communist ladder-climber being used by the American Reds as a tool for propaganda. The straight storytelling sans the idealogical bent to this tome is refreshing after reading socialist or narcissistic rants of earlier black authors. As Stanley Crouch would say this man is "immoderately soulful", and possibly the great American novelist, with this, his finest work.

Rating:
Summary: Remarkable work makes one feel complete
Review: Ralph Ellison's the Invisble Man is a touching and meaningful novel. To read this book is to be hooked by the sensual words told by a nameless face, but a face of beauty. When you read this book, the words grab you and take you to a new understanding of life. Told through the eyes of a young southern man trying to make it in the world but getting pushed and thrown down at every attempt he makes. The Invisible Man is a classic and an unforgetable novel that you won't want to put down once you have read the first line

Rating:
Summary: Invisibility? I wish!
Review: Oh that I were an invisible man! I guess the ring of Gygeas principle may apply however. What I liked about this book is its ability to portray things at the heart of human issues, not only racial ones (though obviously it is done in this light). The more invisible he becomes the less socially responsible he feels. How true! How I enjoyed the nameless protagonist and his nameless (though obvious) political group. Rarely has a more real character with more self changing decisions been represented in literature. Bravo, Mr. Ellison

Rating:
Summary: Hmm.
Review: It is with a resounding "Hmm..." that I set this book down,in fact the same "Hmm..." that I'd picked it up with. Ina noble story, Ellison manages to leave me mystified at the end, a task not as easy as one might think. Plagued, if that is the word, by a great many loose ends, this novel still manages to make the reader reflect upon his own soul, and acknowledge his own injustice. Perhaps, in my opinion, the only real problem to this book is its author's knowledge of his own power. The greatest novels have always been written with very meek intentions, while, it seems to me, Ralph Ellison knows damn well what this book will do to us, and never lets us forget it. All around, however, I enjoyed it. -Anthony Gabriele

Rating:
Summary: Overly captivating
Review: I don't know which was morer captivating to me: Ellison's writing style or Ellison's message. Obviously a must read for today's generation to understand not only the struggles, but the resulting feelings and perceptions of race at that time. Ellison presents it with such a powerful demonstration of words that you can experience his trials and tribulations. Great read!

Rating:
Summary: A richly complex tragi-comic novel
Review: Ralph Ellison's THE INVISIBLE MAN is justly celebrated as one of the outstanding American novels of the twentieth century. Though not lacking in universal themes, it truly is a novel rooted in the American experience, a book that explores many of the complexities of race relations in the United States. The book ends by refusing to offer an facile answers or to identify any simple villains. The novel's many villains number as many African Americans as whites, and no true heroes of either race. The sense at the end is that where race relations are concerned, we in America are getting it wrong from beginning to end regardless of our race. Moreover, all political persuasions also seem to be guilty of getting it wrong.

Structurally, THE INVISIBLE MAN owes a great deal to that genre of the English novel that deals with the coming of age of a youthful hero. Indeed, this novel could be profitably be compared to TOM JONES, only without the philosophical sidetracking one finds in that novel and set in the United States with a black hero. Like Tom Jones, the narrator of THE INVISIBLE MAN is thrown by fate from one bizarre experience to another, never being an actor in his own story, but merely a reactor. The narrator does not seize his own fate, but allows himself to be passively shifted about. His story is largely told through stringing together a number of bizarre incidents: a surreal Battle Royal in which a group of young blacks are blindfolded and forced to fight one another for the amusement of a group of whites, who later listen to the battered narrator present a speech that he hopes will win him a scholarship to college. At college he serves as driver for one of the school's white benefactors, but instead of it being an occasion for furthering his career, the day degenerates despite his best intentions into a pure nightmare, which results in his expulsion from school. He travels to New York to seek work, but the only thing he gets from his one day of working in a paint factory is a concussion and short term disability payments. Finally--and this embraces most of the last half of the novel--our hero inadvertently becomes a political speaker for the Communist party (an experience that reflects Ellison's own experience as a political writer for the Communists in the 1930s, though in the novel he refers to them only as The Brotherhood). His work as a Communist organizer is contrasted with an African Black Nationalist agitator named Ras, who in the tradition of Marcus Garvey believes in the separation of the races. What links all these adventures together is that throughout the Narrator is never affirmed or perceived for who he is in himself. All without exception focus on him as a mere member of his race, never on him as an individual. Indeed, while the Communists are largely lacking in the racism he finds elsewhere, their interest in him largely lies in the use to which he can be put. They are, in fact, not interested in individuals at all, and even if they are hostile towards class rather than race, they are equally as hostile towards the individual.

The novel is profoundly political. Ellison is equally disenchanted with those who feel that the goal for blacks is to educate them so that they can gradually become more and more accepted in a white-dominated society, with the Communists who want to eliminate the individual for the sake of the group (indeed, who are willing to sacrifice individuals and even groups of individuals for the sake of furthering the purposes of history), and those who call for a radical withdrawal of blacks from all social intercourse with whites. Instead, he argues at the end of the novel for the primacy of the individual against race, history, or the group. In the end, he expresses the desire to be viewed as himself, apart from whatever categories can be used to define him.

The tone of the book is comic without being truly funny. There is a surreality about most of the sections of the book. Given Ellison's political background in Communism, this is of profound significance. For the Communists, all legitimate fiction had to be starkly realistic. There is very little realism in THE INVISIBLE MAN. Much of the novel is comically nightmarish. In fact, while looking backward the novel reminded me of novels like TOM JONES, looking forward it reminded me of CATCH-22. I do not know if Joseph Heller was influenced by this book, but I would be very surprised if he was not. Much as that novel blends the comic and the tragic (though it is far funnier than Ellison's book, or indeed more than just about any other novel), so did Ellison's. In fact, it is hard to find models for Ellison's book, unless one points to TOM JONES as I have, or perhaps in a vague way to the novels of James Joyce. Indeed, it is hard to realize what a wildly original novel THE INVISIBLE MAN is, if only because he pioneered a narrative style that became commonplace later. Another thing to note about his anti-realism style is his characters. For the most part, Ellison's do not resemble people you would meet in real life. Many are intentional caricatures, many grotesques in the tradition of Charles Dickens. All are intended to emphasize the unreality and nightmarish quality of the narrator's life.

I truly love this novel. It is one of the few important "African American" novels that is more important for its literary qualities than for its role as a racial novel. Ellison makes some amazing and brilliant innovations on the traditional English novel. This is often said to be the finest novel ever written by an African American, but that really is damning it with faint praise. It is almost a way of making it The Invisible Novel. This novel's greatness does not lie in having been written by a black writer, but in being a magnificently marvelous novel on purely literary grounds. My only regret is that Ellison largely turned his back on fiction after publishing THE INVISIBLE MAN. He was also an absolutely brilliant essayist and jazz critic (his formal education was largely in music theory and he early on aspired to being a jazz musician), but I wish he had not so completely abandoned fiction.

Rating:
Summary: A well told story lacking a knock out blow
Review: Ellison's landmark novel, Invisible Man was truly ahead of its time. It dared to exploit the issues of racism at a time when our country most needed it. It became a standard to which many future black authors would look to. By some, it is considered the best novel an African American has ever written. If not, it at least considered by a majority of its readers, an American masterpiece.

Invisible Man opens with the narrator telling us exactly what he is and how he came to be like that. It opens in almost a surrealistic fashion and we are drawn in and instantly captivated. Ellison sets the mood and we desperately want to learn more. He then begins with horrific opening scene of his life. The narrator is never named. We know from the beginning he is a college educated black man. He is also an eloquent orator. In the startling opening sequence to his story, he is manipulated into giving a speech at what he thinks is a dignified event. It is nothing more than a horrific display of racism in which white men use black anger and fighting as a form of mere entertainment. This scene sets the mood of the novel

After the opening we follow the nameless protagonist through his life. First, he gets kicked out of college by the black college president for not treating a rich white donor as he should. This black president promises him a job, but ironically the letters that he sends to all the "would-be" employer's of the nameless narrator are in actually warning to not hire him and not letters of recommendations as he promised. The narrator realizes this and has to take up a job at the local paint making factory. Here we learn some symbolism of the "white" world as Emerson brilliant uses metaphors comparing the paint to racial misunderstandings.

Eventually, a member of the "brotherhood" which is a black and white semi communist party hears a magnificent speech delivered by the narrator, which he gives to an angry black mob on the verge of an attack on white officers. The member of this organization is impressed with his speech and the nameless narrator becomes the spokesman in the city of Harlem for this organization.

The nameless narrator learns that the organization is merely using him and he is just a pawn for them The bulk of this story is the narrator coming to grips that he merely is just an invisible man to these people, most of whom are white, and they just use him to their own advantage. Sadly, the narrator doesn't realize this until it is too late and has been blinded all along by their deception.

In the end, the narrator breaks free of their grasp, but also comes to realize that his entire life to this point has been no more than being an invisible man to those around him. His own self-identity and worth has been lost. Finally, he gets his redemption and learns who he truly is.

It is hard to really name anything wrong with this novel. The language is beautiful, dark, and almost has a poetic ring to it in certain passages. It blends the issues of racism, bigotry, and individualism together in an interesting, well told story. I can't argue with the language or substance. You can feel that this story meant a lot to the author. I believe it is an important book on history in America. Ellison has so much talent and the story is as well told as any I have heard.

So, why not a perfect rating for Invisible Man? If anyone claims it to be a masterpiece I certainly wouldn't argue with them. For me, it came close, but I just kept waiting for something more to happen. What exactly? I'm not sure. It just seems like in order for a book to be a masterpiece something more has to happen. This book has no real climax. The ending was also a bit too preachy and wasn't as straight forward as it could have been. It is like you sit on the edge of your seat waiting for the big explosion, the powerful moment that will take your breath away, but it never comes. Of course, not all novels would be appropriate for such a moment or climax, but it seemed a book about these important issues, this powerful statement on the way things are and the way things should be, seemed like it should have had such a moment. It seemed in order to take this book to the next level of genius it needed something more that never was delivered.

Nevertheless, this is a very, very good novel. It is told with brilliant language, the characters are very realistic and the setting was dead on target. The power and emotion I thought it would exhume just didn't come to me. I just wish it could have affected me more somehow. How it could have done that exactly? I'm not sure, but I kept getting this feeling that something was missing. The answer might be as invisible as the character himself.

Grade: A-

Rating:
Summary: The Greatest American Novel
Review: Unqueationably Ellison has written the greatest American novel in every sense of the phrase. The story is the epic search for an identity, an American identity in a world that labels individuals in order to negate their power. The titular modern hero represents any man or woman pinioned against the floor of life by the boot of American capitalism which dictates everyone's role in life before they're even born. It is this maxim which the Invisible Man must discover for himself, i.e. the rules of the game are not what he has learned in school and until he realizes this dichotomy between America the real and America the ideal he moves from school to work to political activisim constantly defeating himself. The novel is Zen before Zen was in. The spiritual journey described in images replete with cinema and words that narrate themselves should resonate with any reader who has ever searched for satisfaction, serenity and contentment in life only to find hurt, pain and disappointment in all the commercially prescribed solutions. The work is epic by covering the most salient facets of modern American life from a psychological perspective which attempts to heal the narrator and the reader as well. A little dated in the sense that it doesn't approach drugs/alcoholism or gay identities, Ellison had little choice but to be conservative so as not to blur the meaning of his message as well as to avoid the political oppression going on in the country at the time. The novel is sophisticated, intellectual, humorous, magical, adventurous, gargantuan, approachable, and best of all a good read. I thoroughly recommend this work NOT as an African American novel on identity, but as a novel on AMERICAN IDENTITY.