COMMENTARY: Invisible Man (1952)
The following are thoughts and reactions I had while reading Invisible Man (1952) by Ralph Ellison. They do not reflect my overall post-reading opinion of the work.
⚠️ SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD ⚠️
- Holy FUCK. That first chapter was the tensest thing I’ve read in a long time. It’s so disgusting, and horrifying, and shocking. Just the degradation and dehumanization amped up to eleven.
- When you read books from a black POV, it’s like tension is guaranteed. You literally never know when some white dude is gonna hurt you, insult you, mess with you, or just flat out kill you for no good reason. It’s just constant paranoia. Is the white guy the POV is chauffeuring around safe to be around? Or is he just a condescending guy who thinks building a university for black people and talking about values makes him great? I don’t know. I’m just frightened the entire time.
- Oh. Is this just a device to move the POV around to different aspects/layers of society to show all the different ways America is racist? Worried the overall thread won’t keep me engaged if it’s a series of short stories.
- Oh man… the POV’s youth and foolishness thinking the dean was treating him fair by sending him to NYC… I fell for it too. Totally thought maybe he was doing him a solid. Nope. Just betrayal. Worse… kept the POV in the dark. Fuck.
- 50% mark. OK. Yeah. So POV just gets pushed around in a new and different way each chapter.
- Looked up the wiki. Right. It’s a bildungsroman: “a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood (coming of age), in which character change is important. The term comes from the German words Bildung (“education”, alternatively “forming”) and Roman (“novel”). This makes sense.
- Interesting tidbit: According to The New York Times, Barack Obama modeled his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father on Ellison’s novel.
- ch.22 of course his “brothers” are assholes when he finally takes his own initiative after spending 70% of the novel getting pushed around. Of course.
- pg.484 is this how he becomes invisible? With sunglasses and a hat? lol.
- Is being Rinehart the apex of the theme of the book? That the POV has no identity and it’s all imposed on him to the point where he’s mistaken for one simply by putting on a white hat and dark glasses?
- or… is being Rinehart the most empowering thing you can do? POv has had no power the entire novel. When he could act, the Brotherhood shot him down for taking initiative. But as Rinehart, he is free to play all these different roles. It’s still not his “true identity”… but there’s power. Power requires us to put on this mask.
- pg. 498 - “He was years ahead of me and I was a fool. I must have been crazy and blind. The world in which we lived was without boundaries. A vast seething, hot world of fluidity, and Rine the rascal was at home. Perhaps only Rine the rascal was at home in it. It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.”
- Pg. 506 - “Jumping from the pot of absurdity to the fire of the ridiculous.”
- ch.24 what the fuck man.