The Invisible Man: Ralph Ellison (week 3)
Details
The Invisible Man (1952) is Ralph Ellison's National Book Award-winning novel, named by Modern Library as #19 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. It opens with an epigraph from "Benito Cereno," inspiring much critical commentary on the literary relationship between Ellison and Melville.
The narrator is a nameless young black man living in the 20th-century United States. Because the people he encounters "see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination," he is effectively invisible: living alienated, in Kafkaesque absurdity, and forced to survive through pretense. He moves from the Deep South to Harlem, ultimately retreating to a hole underground--brilliantly illuminated by stolen electricity--where he reflects on his search for meaning, confronting personal experience and social illusion, and what it means to be a black man and its various masks. His existential inquiry into identity as such--exploring themes of truth, perception, and racism--brings the reader on a journey of realization and a critique of American society.
In his National Book Award acceptance speech, Ellison said he had wanted to create "a novel that would have all the bright magic of a fairy tale."
We will read:
- Week 1: Prologue - ch. 9
- Week 2: ch. 10 - 17
- Week 3: ch. 18 - Epilogue
The Invisible Man: ~360pp
Supplemental:
- "INVISIBLE TO WHOM? Ralph Ellison, Double Consciousness, and African American Identity Politics"
- Louis Armstrong
Extracts:
- "'You are saved,' cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; 'you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?'" ("Benito Cereno," quoted in The Invisible Man)
- "And though beauty be obvious, the only loveliness is invisible." (Mardi, 1.30)
This meetup is part of a series on Muses and Monsters and celebrating Black History Month.