Rating: 
Summary: My Take
Review: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is at its core a treatise on man's inhumanity to man. What could cause people to put up with the horrifying "Battle Royal" depicted early in the novel. It's very simple, actually, as Ralph Ellison repeatedly lets us know. Most human beings treat their fellow men as pawns to be manipulated in order to fulfill certain selfish means. We see this again and again in the novel. The white benefactor to the college views the main character and his university as nothing more than another tax write-off or an antidote to his nagging conscience. When he is confronted with the reality of the deep South, when the horror of the true conditions of most blacks is revealed to him during the road trip, the main character is expelled for exposing these members of society the dean wants to keep "invisible." The Communist Party also views blacks as nothing more than a special interest group that they can keep in check and manipulate through their rhetoric. To them, the main character, with his great legitimate success and intelligence, is a greater threat than Ras the Destroyer, a mindless thug. Ras is helping the blacks stay invisible, but the main character is pushing them to succeed and forcing society to deal with them as human beings, which the party finds unacceptable. Upon realizing this, the main character at first tries to "defeat them with yeses" as his father advised him and withdraws from the people who cannot see his inner being. However, he concludes that such an acceptance is a betrayal of himself. He decides to learn to start "saying yes and saying no" to the roles that are thurst upon him. What is the universal message here? It is that in this world, social relationships have been established between human beings, but in almost all of these relationships we are restrained from exposing our inner self. Think about it. Try to count how many unwritten rules you follow in you interactions with other people. There are things you can and cannot say, feelings you can and cannot express, ideas that you can and cannot convey, parts of your soul that you can and cannot reveal. It all depends on who you are dealing with. How are we to respond to such a situation? We must "say yes and say no," we must accept certain boundaries but strive to look beyond them and, little by little, push them back.
Rating:
Summary: Superb
Review: I have nothing more to say about this novel that the other five star reviewers haven't. This is a wonderful book filled with symbolism and prejudices. Go out and read it, you won't be sorry. I've read it twice (and I hardly ever read anything twice). Highly recommended!
Rating: 
Summary: States the obvious; misses the less-obvious
Review: This 125-page commentary on Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" was written in 1988 by an English professor at McGill. Its points (except those quoted from other sources) are all obvious and it sometimes descends to the level of summary. It also dismisses every extreme point of view presented in the novel by saying that "we", of course, know that lack of moderation is silly: no argument or engagement is required. A very poor work.
Rating:
Summary: An American Masterpiece
Review: Quite simply, this is one of the three greatest American novels of the 20th century (the others being Nathanael West's "Miss Lonelyhearts" and Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita"). Ellison's "Invisible Man" is a multi-layered tragicomic phantasmagoria about a nameless "holy fool" who stumbles through various versions of the American nightmare. We first meet him as an earnest, naive young man who has been invited to a white southern businessmen's banquet, supposedly given in his honor (he has been deemed a "good negro" and granted a scholarship to study at a negro college obviously modeled on Tuskegee). When he shows up, however, he discovers that before he can receive his prize, he must fight a battle royale against a dozen other blacks who have been recruited for this barbaric entertainment. Suffering through this terrifying indignity, bruised and bloody, he gets his scholarship and manages to muddle through his first three years at college without incident...until the day he is asked to chaffeur his school's wealthy white liberal benefactor around town. With his genius for always doing the wrong thing, our protagonist in a few short hours inadvertently takes the benefactor on a surreal guided tour of all the worst stereotypes of black life, visiting an incestuous tenant farmer and a local whorehouse. Enraged, the prissy upstanding college president banishes our protagonist to New York City, giving him letters of "recommendation" guaranteed to "keep this nigger boy running" forever from one hopeless job offer to the next. Eventually, like the young Richard Wright before him, our Invisible Man falls in with the local Communist Party and believes he has finally found a place where he is accepted and respected...only to discover that he has really fallen into a hideous nest of vipers who want to provoke a deadly race riot which they can then exploit for their own political gain. The novel brims with bizarre yet credible characters, such as Ras the Exhorter, a mystical Don Quixote-like street preacher & prophet. So many scenes in the book have a hallucinatory intensity, yet hit you with a shock of recognition--many times while reading it I said aloud, "Yes, yes, I know that type of person, I've been in that kind of situation, Ellison really captures the feeling of being there!" Like Richard Wright's autobiography "Black Boy," this novel is gripping and compulsively readable. An astonishing masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: Classic dive into the search for an identity
Review: First off, anyone whos says this book is too biased, or is just giving racism in return for racism, completely missed the message of the book. It is not a book about racism, but about the fact that noone, black or white, saw the protagonist ("him" from now on) for what he was. Other black people expected him to act a certain way, white people looked down on him, everyone had their own plan for him, wanted him as their own tool, instead of just taking him for what he was. It accurately portrays what it would be like to be a young black man in it's time, torn between the search for success and the search for pride. On another note, the book does lull at some points, but the style of writing in it's time was different than that of today, so that should be taken into consideration, and the small lulls hardly take anything away from the overall quality of the book-outstanding. There is so much in this book...just reading it really is a journey in itself, a very satisfying one. "He" is forced to ask himself questions about himself that we all have at some point...don't want to give away too much plot though. Overall, the only way to not enjoy this book is if you're not capable of sitting down with a long, steady-paced book, or if you're just too ignorant to understand brilliance when you've spent all that time reading it.
Rating:
Summary: Overwhelmingly wonderful
Review: I usually don't review books I haven't finished yet, but I think it will take me years to figure out what I think about Invisible Man, and I'm so excited by it that I can't wait. I'm less than halfway through and it has become my favorite novel of all time, displacing Anna Karenina. I especially love how the events are often non-naturalistic as in modernist works like Ulysses (time stretches or speeds up, events that are just barely possible but more likely magical occur), but the style is clear and simple, not obscure like the works of Woolf or Joyce. An amazing book.
Rating: 
Summary: Mixed feelings
Review: I have mixed feelings about this book. I read it, and finished it, because it was recommended to me by a friend who saw me reading _The Invisible Soldier_ by Mary Penick Motley.
The book's dreamlike, and occasionally nightmarish, qualities detract from its effectiveness. When the narrator takes Norton on the drive around campus, the events turn nightmarish -- through virtually no fault of the narrator, events turn into a drawn-out out-of-control nightmare where things unbelievably keep getting worse and worse. The narration by Trueblood seems interminable, as do the bizarre events at the Golden Day.
Not only does Dr. Bledsoe banish the narrator from college, but he does so in a manner where the narrator doesn't even feel the knife in his back, and even unknowingly becomes the instrument of his own further destruction. Dr. Bledsoe's actions are typical of those who later interact with the narrator. Is Bledsoe acting to protect his own position, or the continuation of the college, or the furtherance of the African American race, or to benefit the narrator?
Continually through the book, the narrator is faced with the decision of speaking out and becoming a target, or remaining silent and assenting to injustice. The groups and individuals which attract, use, or attack the narrator are archetypes of later groups in the civil rights movement: the Brotherhood represents those who would deny African American leadership in the movement in the name of brotherhood and unity, while Ras represents a very separatist movement.
For all its historic significance and eloquence, there are better choices than this book. Ellison himself says in his forward, with regard to African American service in World War II, "How could you treat a Negro as equal in war and then deny him equality during times of peace?" For an excellent book on African American soldiers in World War II, read _The Invisible Soldier_ by Mary Penick Motley. And of course for a more objective, less dreamlike, odyssey, read _Black Like Me_ by John Griffin. Reading the works of Malcolm X, and works about Malcolm X, also provides a valuable perspective.
Rating:
Summary: Classic
Review: This is one of those books that will define American Literature for years to come. It is brilliant, and it's probably one I'll hold other books about race and/or identity up to. The narrator's transformation from eager-to-please student to agitator felt very honest and his anger frustration was palpable. I also loved the 'set pieces' like the Golden Day and the paint factory. The writing was so crisp.
Rating:
Summary: Didn't really feel this
Review: Perhaps it was the slow start of the book, or maybe Ellison's writting style, but I could never really jump into this book, and turn the pages without thinking. This book was a drag to read, the main character seemed beyond crazy, and I don't seem to understand what Ellison meant by being black means being invisible. Infact, that part alone is what gave me the biggest trouble. Being invisible when your black isn't the problem.
Rating:
Summary: The Definitive African-American Novel of the 20th C.
Review: One of the best novels I have read in my life, I have come to believe Ellison's book, "Invisible Man", to be one of the clearest expressions of the African American experience in the first half of the 20th century. It is heart-breakingly and searingly honest in it's portrayal of how the everyday black man, just trying to get by and do right in America, felt about himself and the world around him in a time when the fires of racism in this country were still buring out in the open. Ellison's nameless protagonist takes us through a moderday urban "Inferno" as he tries to find a place for himself in the world. Every sentence is perfectly constructed and the narrative, while beautiful in style, still evokes every ounce of pain the Protagonist feels physically and emotionally. The book is rightly concluded with an open ending seeing that at the time of its publication, and unfortunatly even until today, the problem of racism still exists alive and well in our country and is yet to be solved. Hopefully one day, no person, black, brown, yellow or white will be invisible.
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