Invisible man

this is poetry in a romance and is deeply rooted in metaphor to the actual lives of black people in the african diaspora. it is a heavy book, you cannot expect someone to take all that there is to be taken out of this book just in one go. the complexity of the main character and the way he sees and is seen made me think a lot about race nowadays and how it has almost not changed.

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man shouldn't be confused with H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man. While the sci-fi classic deals with literal invisibility, the unnamed black man who narrates his story in Ellison's novel is only figuratively invisible. We meet him at the end of his story, living in a New York City basement that he's lit up brightly by siphoning power from the utility. Ellison doesn't belabor the metaphor...right from the start, the narrator tells us that it's his status as a black man in mid-century America that renders him effectively invisible.

The novel is made up of his story and how he came to recognize his own non-entity status. And it hits you in the gut right away: the first incident he relates from his life is when he's awarded a scholarship from a prestigious philanthropic organization in the small Southern town in which he grows up. He's invited to a country club dinner to make a speech about his scholarship, but once he gets there, he and several other young black men are forced to fight each other and be humiliated chasing for electrified coins. Only after he's been degraded is he allowed to give his speech and receive the scholarship and the briefcase. It's a horrifying sequence, incredibly difficult to read, and the book is just getting started.

This experience, and the ones that the narrator has at a black college and then in New York are rooted in a fundamental denial of his humanity. He's entertainment, or a tool, or an experiment, or just disposable. He struggles and fights and gets up after being knocked down over and over again, but he can't escape the fact of his race and the broad social structures designed to keep him and other black men firmly in the underclass. And while things have gotten better today, it's maybe not as much better as we'd like to think.

This is a hard book to read. Not because of the quality...Ellison's writing is incredible. But it's heavy and dark and the unending awfulness of what the narrator is subjected to is a lot to get your head around. I usually try not to get heavily into politics on this blog, but I read this book right after the 2016 election, and it really made me think about the racism that persists in our society.

So. After two weeks. I have finished “Invisible Man”. I have a lot of opinions and thoughts about this book, but one thing is clear. The message was profound and blaring and loud. The many characters all represented a facet of society that tells the black man what to do and what to feel. They are, essentially, an invisible creature. People who are pushed around by ideologies and different agendas by different groups proclaiming “equality” or “justice” or “fairness”. The Invisible Man tries to be who he is not. He tries to be everything and anything these people demand for him to be, but he realizes that it was all for naught. He is an outsider yet an insider, but a whole different thing altogether. He knows that although people may not know it yet, he is speaking for them too. I just hope the masses realize this and give him the proper acknowledgement.
Gooooood book.