SUMMARY: The narrator of Invisible Man is a nameless young black man who moves in a 20th-century United States where reality is surreal and who can survive only through pretense. Because the people he encounters "see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination," he is effectively invisible. He leaves the racist South for New York City, but his encounters continue to disgust him. Ultimately, he retreats to a hole in the ground, which he furnishes and makes his home. There, brilliantly illuminated by stolen electricity, he can seek his identity.
DETAIL: Invisible Man is Ralph Ellison’s only novel and is widely acknowledged as one of the great novels of African-American literature. The invisibility of Ellison’s protagonist is about the invisibility of identity—above all, what it means to be a black man—and its various masks, confronting both personal experience and the force of social illusions.
The novel’s special quality is its deft combination of existential inquiry into identity as such—what it means to be socially or racially invisible—with a more socio-political allegory of the history of the African-American experience in America. The first-person narrator remains nameless, retrospectively recounting his shifts through the surreal reality of surroundings and people from the racist South to the no less inhospitable world of New York City. SOURCE: Britannica
Being a WHITE MAN with an English Degree, I love to read novels regardless of which race or gender or ethnic group wrote them. Ellison's novel was moving for me in the late 1960's and is still moving for me half a century later. I am sad that Mr. Ellison only wrote one such novel as I would have liked to have read more.
While being the son of a white immigrant who was the son of a white immigrant who was the son of a white immigrant, I literally have no idea what it was like to be treated as a slave... but, I do know what it is like to be an educated man in a RICH MAN'S WORLD and that experience in the 20th Century is not much different than being a black man outside of being racially profiled by the POLICE...
I grew up lower middle class I would have to say and during my father's career my parents moved up into the upper middle class category but never any further... while I remained in the lower middle class of America and had to pay the price of not being wealthy or have wealthy friends to call on for support.
I was always MORE EDUCATED than all of my bosses except when I taught my final 3 years in a University environment... but the politics at this so called CHRISTIAN School were more devious and devastating than any of those experienced before... sadly... there were no wealthy people involved on which to blame.
During my 45 year career... I TOO WAS INVISIBLE... including those years spent as an enlisted man in the military.
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