Book Six: Ellison's Invisible Man

Here I am, on the other side, book six of ten.  I am wondering if it is a good thing or a bad one that I am not on any time limit here.  Probably for the best, since life keeps happening, and a lot of times other wheels are squeakier.  I have been trying to recall what it was that I heard about Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison that made it a must read for me.  The truth is that I just flat out don't remember.  All I can say is that whatever it was, it was profound enough to reserve a place for the book in my mind.

I didn't intentionally choose two books for 1952.  That is just how it worked out.  It is funny now because I couldn't have chosen two more different books if I had tried.  The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway, is a slender novella notable for its lack of purple prose.  In comparison, Invisible Man is practically a magnum opus.  It is poetry and music crafted into a novel.  This book reads like an autobiography.  Ellison is very tricky.  His narrator is a black man who feels that he is invisible, and to underline that point, the reader does not get to know his name.  Early on the narrator teases us with invitations to, "Call me Jack the Bear," and "Call me a 'thinker tinker'" (Ellison 6,7).  He lives secretly in a part of the basement of a building that only rents to whites and he has devised a way to acquire electricity without paying for it and has installed over 1,300 lights to brighten up his "hole," as he affectionately refers to his home (6,7).  The narrator is a philosopher and treats the reader to statements such as "The truth is the light and light is the truth (7), while hinting at the truth of music as well.  All of the above occurs in the prologue and the narrator sets up to explain how he came to his current state of invisibility by taking the reader twenty years back.  And, oh, does he have a story to tell.

In terms of structure, the novel has a prologue and epilogue that hold twenty-five chapters between them.  It will be interesting to compare and contrast the experiences of the narrator of Invisible Man with John of Jonah's Gourd Vine as the worlds in which each of these characters exists are profoundly different.  More on that later.

Next post I will focus on the disturbing and nauseating "battle royal" of chapter one.
Ellison, Ralph.  Invisible Man.  New York:  Vintage International, 1995.  Print.