Category: Invisible Man

This whole world is a carnival imbibed by the circumvention conventions of contemporary society. We are all engulfed by the introvert aptitude in the world’s carnival and take recourse to bring the invisibility within at the focus of everyone. This is what Ralph Ellison did in his so profound exemplary book “Invisible Man”. Carnivalesque as a term formed by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin refers to the literary mode that challenges and unshackle the assumption of the atmosphere of authoritarian style or atmosphere through the use of humor or chaos. The world of Ralph Ellison is a carnivalesque approach to the taboo and fears following the interaction between the black women and the white men.

Many critics have generalized the version of the “Invisible Man” as the most influential novel of the Post World War II and the greatest literary work highlighting the extraordinary way the invisible black man strives and struggles for his place in the white dominated society. But the most crucial aspect is to analyze this invisible man in the light of the political context and through new literary critical strategies and lenses to bring at the man’s conscious level the most important historical movements of the American society. Christopher A. Shinn has most adequately looked into the issues and life of black men in Ralph’s Ellison, “Invisible Man”. This new lens is through the carnivalesque approach propounded by Mikhail Bakhtin and many others like Julia Kristeva, Robert Da Matta, and Richard D. E. Burton, among others (Shinn, Shinn, Masquerade…. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man).

The “Invisible Man” should be looked at in the political context through the carnivalesque approach overlooked by the earlier critics. Many critics have criticised “Invisible Man” as politically conservative because it appears to give an unconcealed account of political guidance to its readers which ends in a definite call for action and certain good political reasons for the vagueness. The political approach in the novel lies in its structure by which it asks various questions towards the liberation of the blacks and putting into the dialogue form. The “Invisible Man” has attained the double vision forcibly imposed on them as they make them politically aware of their position in the racist society. This double vision is their struggle between the images they hold for themselves and political schemes, their desire and the way they express themselves and their ardent desire to resist. But if we look at the deeper level, double vision is an attack on their dualistic personality, and weakening the very position they are standing. Through double vision at one hand they want to show their presence and identity at personal as well as the cultural level and they get success in making their presence felt while on the other hand it is yet again deferred and their political stand is also one hand accepted while on the other hand challenged. (Reed, 59-60) This is the position blacks were finding themselves. This double vision is revealed in the statement “I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Ellen Poe”(Harris & Bundy, p. 109).

Ralph Ellison elaborated on the struggle of the man in a quest of his own identity in the white world and he found that his efforts had been made complex due to the fact that he is a black man in the racist white society where every task of his is viewed through the white man’s lens. Christopher you had also brought into focus seemingly in the light of the struggle of self-identification of the man in the blind world and in the mythic carnival. This world is like a carnival appearing to be magical, and everyone performing ritual sacrifice and hiding and enjoying behind the masks. In the “Invisible Man” too, every human being has blinded himself to reality and plays a dubious role in the midst of the ritual sacrifice and magic. Throughout the novel, the narrator finds himself passing across the various departments and communities. For e.g. He enters the plant of the Liberty Paints to the Brotherhood as a worker but at every step he has to endorse himself with the notion of different ideas and the way he should behave in society. As the protagonist attempts to define himself, as he passes through various values and expectations imposed on him, in each case the prescribed role poses a limitation on his thoughts and conduces him to perform the most inauthentic role. While working at Liberty Paints, he finds himself involved in the process whereby white is dependent on the black for the work like mixing of the paint tones and the racial makeup of the workforce. Yet the factory does not acknowledge his contributions when the final product is presented and the narrator as the black man ends up hushed.

The narrator realizes the fact that he has to see the world as others would like to see him and the limitation posed on him on his vision in turn places limitations on the way of his actions. He comes to the conclusion that he is invisible in this worldly carnival, where the whole world is a mere stage acting and masquerading as the other deems them to do. He is not able to act as his personality demands him to and adopts invisibility in an attempt to cast off the stereotypes, but in the end he finds himself too passive and decides to make an active contribution towards the society as most complex human being. He would try to exert his power over the world and social system and would force others to acknowledge his contributions, beliefs and practices beyond their prejudiced expectations.

Wilson Harris rhetorically commented that “Invisible Man is a repetitively dying (yet cyclically reawakening) god who is metaphorically consumed first in the boxing ring phase of the novel, then in the Bledsoe phase, then in the paint factory explosion phase, and in other succeeding Harlem phases in which he is symbolically castrated yet bleakly ‘potentialized’, rendered metaphysically potent, within the womb of space.” (Harris & Bundy, p. 109) At each phase of the cannibalized figure as you envisage, an invisible man takes on in his life through the awakening of the self or rebirth in the swath in the so-called civilization.

During the course of his life journey in the world of whites, he finds the complexity with which he is engulfed in his inner self is not limited only to the racism of the people but also the ideological perspective. He came to visualize that ideologies presented by the institutions are far simpler and one sided so as to fulfill what is required for the complex as an individual’s identity. The novel presents several kinds of ideologies; one from the tamer, sycophantic ideology as presented by Booker T. Washington at the narrator’s college to the more violent, and other separatist thoughts raised by Ras the Exhorter. But the biggest ideological point he found is from the Brotherhood. He was taught to save other people and free them from the bondage of slavery but they instead were betraying the whole concept of freedom and individuality. The novel focuses on the point that life is very rich, compounded in unpredictability but it also reaches its beauty when it gives surprises. This is nothing else than the carnivalesque of the Christopher and what you found reflecting in the Butler-Evans version of carnivalesque where he mixes vernacular Black voice to the “‘literariness’ of the protagonist’s voice”. (Shinn, Masquerade…. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man) and conveys “carnivalesque” as a “spirit” that would displace hierarchies and destabilizes the dominant order. (Shinn, Masquerade…. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man).

Not only the protagonist falls into the stereotyping image of racism but also tries to escape from the clutches of prejudice, he comes face into the face with the other blacks that try to adopt a defense strategy for all the African Americans. They themselves try to focus on the point that how blacks should act to make their place in the white society. They brought about the theoretical presumption that if they themselves don’t act according to what is prescribed they would likely be betraying their own race. Yet the narrator finds in it one stereotype being replaced with the other stereotype and one role exchanged with the other role. Hereby what you said implies the same, while giving the example of the invisible man’s encounter with the naked blonde woman in the Battle Royal Scene. With this example, he could better learn to live with his predicament and become psychically aware of his own myopic Homeric-Cyclopean vision. In other words, he feels helpless on the one hand to change the standards while on the other hand change his own vision and what he himself wants to see. As Patrice D Rankin too said that Invisible Man’s adoration of blond woman is symbolic of the Cyclops’ uncontrolled desire. (Rankine, p. 137) With the body sporting an American Flag, she is a social projection of a white male audience.

Just like in carnival there is a beauty and the beast and rituals and magic and all enjoy these shows and extravagance, but we are blind to the fact what is going behind these extravagancies, our life is also a carnival covered with the blind thoughts and ideologies taught to us without getting into the reality. People avoid looking at the truth and face the inability to see what they like to see and what they don’t like to see. They are incapable to see what their prejudice does not want them to see forcing them into the life of invisibility. They also refuse to acknowledge what is the truth about their own life and their community. For e.g. boys who are fighting at the battle royal are blindfolded, which is a symbolic representation of their exploitive nature at the hands of the white men. Another symbol is that of the Founders’ statute which is within eyes symbolizing the neglect of reality facing racism. Like this, there are several instances of blindness in the novel repeating again and again the notion of the virtually blind man amidst the show of worldly affairs.

This whole world is a carnival where we often find ourselves in the struggle of what we want to achieve and what we get, what we want to gain from life and what we lose and what are our ideals and expectations and what we are forced to believe. This was prevalent in the world when racism was at its peak but its relevance is very well prevalent now also when we are still bounded by our blindness and cannot see age-old conventions of blindness.

References

1. Ellison, Ralph. “Invisible Man” New York: Vintage, 1980.
2. Harris, Wilson & Bundy, A.J.M. “Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination”. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999.
3. Reed, T.V. “Fifteen Jugglers, Five Believers: Literary Politics and the Poetics of American Social Movements”. Los Angeles: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 1992.
4. Shinn, Christopher A. “Masquerade, Magic, and Carnival in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man”. African American Review (AAR) 2002; 36 (2): 243-61.
5. Rankie, Patrice D. “Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature.” Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

Ralph Ellison is best remembered for his first novel “Invisible Man”, a sensational and emotional book that can shock or sicken the reader. What is undeniable is that Ellison’s “Invisible Man” will surely make an impact. Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma and educated at Tuskegee Institute (Prescott, 23) (Butler, 19). He had studied music and sculpture and delivered lectures on Negro culture and James Joyce. He was also a writer who had written several short stories and essays on literary criticism. Ellison worked on Invisible Man for five years and it was published in 1952 and won the National Book Award for fiction (Ellison and Gracer, 2).

Invisible Man revolves around the emotional and intellectual hazards faced by the educated Negro in America. The book works at two levels: level of story-telling and level of exaggeration, suggestion, and symbolism. The physical and emotional segregation of American society in early times is the main theme of Invisible man. The book touches upon the dynamics of personal identity and the ways and limits in which people can know each other. The main protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”, through a gradual transformation through various experiences along his journey of life and the sudden turn of events in the end realizes his true self-identity.

The narrative begins and ends in a small underground room, situated significantly in a “border area.” Between these two points, the main protagonist undergoes many experiences and each experience brings with it lessons for him, causing subtle changes in his beliefs and values. The main protagonist is unnamed because he is invisible in the social context. The book is written as a first-person narrative by the main protagonist, who announces he is an invisible man but also a man of substance “flesh and bone, fiber and liquids”. Once, when the narrator feels that he has been totally ignored by a man, he uses violence to force the man to admit his presence.

Still, he remains unseen, as the newspaper reports the incident as mugging, though he had never tried to rob the man. However, the invisible man also notes that there are some advantages in being ignored by white people as he is able to live in a room that is brightly lit with 1369 light bulbs and free electricity drained off from the Monopolated Light & Power Company.

The long journey that begins with the help of 1369 light bulbs takes place on many planes: geographical, social, historical, and philosophical. The story of Ellison’s protagonist may be described as a quest for an appropriate identity. The invisible man encounters several figures of authority such as Norton, Bledsoe, and the Brotherhood all of whom give him false names and identities that do not suit him. His experiences show that the act of naming is interlinked with issues of power and control. As long as he tries to live life by the dictates of others, he loses his autonomy and is repeatedly betrayed. He discovers the true meaning of his life only after he takes up responsibility for naming himself by telling his own story (Callahan, 191).

As a child, the “main protagonist” was victimized by white Southerners who made Negro youths fight and then, pick coins lying on an electrified rug. He knows that if he is careful he can dodge the electricity. But often, due to the taunts of the surrounding folk, he is struck heavily by the electricity and thrown on the rug, writhing with agony for some time, till he is able to roll free. This experience in fact symbolized the kind of treatment he was to face all through his later life.

Later in life, he undergoes electric shock “treatment” which is intended to have the effect of a prefrontal lobotomy without actually cutting into the brain. The procedure involves the application of pressure to the centers of nerve control, thereby altering the way a man perceives reality. Electricity, which is generally used to give warmth and light, is used here for manipulating the consciousness of the American hero.

The main protagonist learns that life is all about controlling or being controlled. When the invisible man finds himself at loggerheads with Dr. Bledsoe, who runs the State College for Negroes in the South he is told: “This is a power set-up son, and I’m at the controls.” The same message is rubbed into him at a later point in his life when he sees two pictures of bullfighting in a bar. One of them shows the matador controlling the bull and the other shows him tossed on the bull’s horns.

Power in fact seemed to be the major defining force in society. The experience of the invisible man is that power is normally used for cynical manipulation of individuals and it is important that he has to try and come out of the trap of power games. For this end, he needs to have some power of his own – to “illuminate the blackness of my invisibility” – to become aware of his own self.

The narrator is warned in his youth by his dying grandfather, a half-insane war veteran and college president that the world will deceive him if he does not learn to be deceptive. The grandfather advises: “I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree on ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swollen you till they vomit or bust wide open…..Learn it to the young guns” (Ellison, 16). Dr. Bledsoe likewise confesses that he succeeded because he was able to feign humility. He is surprised to see the narrator ignorant of “the difference between the way things are and the way they are supposed to be” (Ellison, 139).

Bledsoe believes that duplicity is necessary to achieve success in the world. The war veteran also tells the protagonist that he must learn to have a fake identity “Play the game, but don’t believe in it – that much you owe yourself…Learn how it operates and learn how you operate” (Ellison, 151). The Invisible man learns the same lesson the hard way as well. He initially thinks that he can play the game without believing in it. But in time, he becomes devoted to the Brotherhood and the myth of racial uplift. Only after the murder of Tod Clifton, he understands the Brotherhood’s role in the Harlem riot and “how false a face the world presents” (Callahan, 193).

The narrator goes to receive his scholarship at a white smoker Southern town. He considers the opportunity to address a white audience as unparalleled and “a triumph for the community”. He expects that he will be truly appreciated for his oratory skills by the audience who will “judge truly (his) ability” (Ellison, 25) and reward him. But, “the gathering turns out to be a bacchanalia” (Callahan, 194).

Together with several other Negroes he is rushed to the front of the ballroom, where a sumptuous blonde tantalizes and frightens them by dancing in the nude. Then, the Negro boys are forced to fight each other blindfolded for the amusement of the drunken whites around them. Finally, amidst humiliation and terror, the narrator had to present a speech of thanks to the white audience. But even then, the narrator is so convinced about the “rightness of things” (Ellison, 30) that he takes care not to offend his audience by spitting out his bloody saliva.

In fact, he felt that the briefcase and scholarship he receives for delivering his speech eclipse all the earlier unpleasant happenings. He begins to think that if he does what the world expects of him, he will be rewarded and accepted. At this point in life, he is confident that things are as they appear to be and that the good people are always rewarded.

While in college, he pursues his American dream and views the administrators and trustees in high esteem as people who have struggled to succeed and make it big in life: “Hereupon this stage the black rite of Horatia Alger was performed to God’s own acting script, with millionaires coming down to portray themselves; not merely acting out the myth of their goodness and wealth and success and power and benevolence and authority in cardboard masks but themselves, these virtues concretely!” (Ellison, 109).

When he enters college, the narrator views Dr. Bledsoe as the ultimate example of achieving the American dream and lists all that he considers as symbols of success: “[Bledsoe] was the example of everything I hoped to be: Influential with wealthy men all over the country; consulted in matters concerning the race; a leader of his people; the possessor of not one, but two Cadillacs, a good salary and a soft, good-looking and creamy-complexioned wife” (Ellison, 99). This showed his immaturity and inability to distinguish between the material award and moral virtue.

Later on, the narrator begins to understand that the outside image of Bledsoe is only a facade. Just before entering Norton’s room, the narrator catches him change his facial expression from rage to placidity and this makes him see Bledsoe as a manipulative and dishonest power monger. But at that point, the narrator is so innocent and naive that when Bledsoe questions him why he did not lie to Norton to avoid showing him Trueblood’s shack, he replies incredulously: “Lie, sir? Lie to him, lie to a trustee, Sir? Me?” (Ellison, 137).

But when the narrator realizes that Bledsoe intends to break his promise to Norton and punish him, he learns that contradictions and accidents can happen in life and it is not necessary that effects should always flow from causes. After being suspended, as he walks towards his dormitory, he finds that the world around him has gone out of focus and he can see properly only by covering one of his eyes. This symbolizes how his perception of the world has altered because of the events.

However, he is still positive and expects that future success will diminish the extent of his present suffering or at least justify it: “There was no other way, and no matter how much I suffered I would pay my debt as quickly as possible and return to building my career” (Ellison, 145). These words may also be interpreted as meaning “that the passage of time will convert his humiliation into a mere rite of passage” (Callahan, 197). Such an acceptance is in accordance with the concept of the American dream and the myth of racial uplift.

During his early days in New York City, the narrator fantasizes about the future but avoids thinking about the past. For example, in the Men’s House, he puts the Bible in a place where he cannot see it because it made him feel homesick” “This was New York. [He] had to get a job and earn money” (Ellison, 159). When he remembers a time when he was expelled, he “hastily” (Ellison, 160) blocks it out. He tries to overlook the past and look forward to a good future that will redeem all this suffering in the past.

This future takes the picture of being Bledsoe’s assistant: “In my mind’s eye…[Bledsoe] was joined by another figure; a younger figure, myself; become shrewd, suave and dressed not in somber garments but in a dapper suit of rich material, cut fashionably, like those of the men you saw in magazine ads, the junior executive types in Esquire” ( Ellison, 160-161).

The protagonist goes job hunting in New York following the regular protocol of being well-groomed, prompt, and articulate. He feels quite sure he will get a good job as a result of manipulating his appearance. But soon he finds himself cheated. The letters of reference he carried looked impressive from the outside but Emerson showed him the contents and he realized that the contents were radically different from what he had expected. Now he realizes that the education he had received was just a sham and he feels that the American dream will never happen for him. Disillusioned by everything he feels freer in mind. He observes: “I now felt contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream” (Ellison, 250).

Symbolically indicating that his dreams have been turned upside down, he empties the spittoon over the head of the Baptist preacher he thinks is Bledsoe. The disillusionment also creates a space within him for examining his past instead of running away from it. He even sings a childhood song “O well they picked poor Robin clean” finding in it a lesson that is applicable to his present state of affairs.

This was quite unlike him in earlier times. Moreover, when he had an appointment with Emerson, the protagonist opts to avoid eating pork chops and grits for breakfast for fear he might be mistaken as having country tastes. However, after he read Bledsoe’s letter, he feels it doesn’t really matter what he eats. This is the beginning of self-acceptance in the narrator. He buys yams and eats them publicly, and remembers having eaten them during his childhood days: “Yes, and we’d loved them candied, or baked in a cobbler, deep-fat fried in a pocket of dough, or roasted with pork and glazed with the well-browed fat; had chewed them raw- yams and years ago” (Ellison, 256).

The narrator describes the period after his college days and before his Brotherhood days as a “period of quietness” (Ellison, 252). But during this period, he undergoes a great deal of emotional upheaval as a result of being disillusioned. This creates in him an intense level of self-awareness and vulnerability that makes him more susceptible to joining the Brotherhood. The main protagonist, the invisible man works for the Brotherhood with faith and commitment. However, he is once again betrayed. To adhere to the Brotherhood, he has to give up the sociology and economics he learned in college and all of the lessons he had learned so far. In fact, the Brotherhood does not suit him any more than the American dream but then his belief was so deep that he failed to see it.

The Brotherhood is an organization that placed the interests of the organization above the interests of the individual. Brother Jack tells the Invisible Man at their first meeting: “you mustn’t waste your emotions on individuals, they don’t count” (Ellison, 284). The protagonist stays in the organization mainly seeking material and intellectual comfort. He also wishes to find some meaning in life in a chaotic world and acquire a system of belief that makes individual and political action significant. “I was dominated by the all-embracing idea of Brotherhood. The organization had given the world a new shape, and me a vital role. We recognized no loose ends, everything could be controlled by our science” (Ellison, 373).

He refused to see the Brotherhood’s mistreatment of him. When he is accused by Brother Wrestrum, he explodes but he convinces himself that the reprimand and the assignment are signs of their faith in him.

On a particular occasion, the narrator sees Clifton sell Sambo dolls on the street corner and he automatically assumes that he must have been made to leave the Brotherhood for such a degrading and meaningless work: “Why should a man deliberately plunge out of history and peddle and obscenity?” (Ellison, 428) he asks himself. Later, when he sees that the Brotherhood is indifferent to Clifton’s death and funeral he realizes that he is as invisible within the organization as he was in his hometown and college. He has an identity only as long as he obeyed the party lines. He had felt he would get a meaning to his life through the Brotherhood’s ideology. Clifton’s death and the response of the Brotherhood to it clearly showed him that Brotherhood can give him an identity only if he does not create any meaning of life for himself.

He realizes that he has been betrayed by Brotherhood as much as he was betrayed by Norton and Bledsoe earlier. He reflects and understands: “Here I had thought [the Brotherhood] accepted me because they felt that color made no difference when in reality it made no difference because they didn’t see either color or men…” (Ellison, 497). He remembers his grandfather’s advice and decides to end the game even while he pretends to play it.

To escape Ras the Exhorter’s followers, the protagonist disguises himself with sunglasses and a hat, only to find that Harlem now saw him as Rinehart, the hustler. He now has a new identity by changing his appearance a bit. The identity of Rinehart seems to suit him because Rinehart is a manipulator who dons multiple roles: pimp, lover, and preacher, he is all things to all people. The narrator now has an identity to escape into and also the chance to change identities at will. Following his principle of duplicity, the protagonist feigns compliance for some time. However, at the Harlem riot, everything went wrong.

He was tangled in a conspiracy of which he knew nothing and was unwittingly used to destroy the black community: “It was not suicide, but murder. The committee had planned it. And I had helped, had been a tool. A tool just at the very moment I had thought myself free” (Ellison, 541). He realizes that he cannot have control over his own life if he tries to play the game without believing in it. It is now that the protagonist decides “to sever his connections to society, to all of the organizations on which he had relied for self-definition, and accepts responsibility for creating his own identity” (Callahan, 208).

After talking to Brother Hambro he understands that life acquires meaning through experience: “I was my experiences and my experiences were me, and no blind men, no matter how powerful they became, even if they conquered the world, could take that or change…it” ( Ellison, 496-97). Therefore, the narrator now retreats underground to write his own story, examine his experiences and give them meaning. Now he is has new mentors – Trueblood and Brother Tarp who guide him to develop a sense of identity independent of any organization or collective set of assumptions.

He finds that all his life he has been taught that it is never possible to be deceptive enough no matter how skilled he feels he is at deception. It is because of this failure to deceive that his efforts to create identities inside and outside an institution fails. When he writes his own story, he generates his own meaning. By giving his story a beginning and an end, he gives his life some structure. He also creates a persona for himself that is different from what others have always tried to impose on him.

He also now has inverse relations with the figures of authority who dominated him in real life. As author/narrator, he can control the identities of people such as Norton, Bledsoe, and Brother Jack. He avenges the humiliations he has undergone at their hands by projecting them in dark light. He finally finds a solution to the problems of identity and authority in the “double consciousness of reliving one’s story as both narrator and protagonist” (Callahan, 209).

Brother Tarp and Trueblood hold that identity is determined by the sum of the complex experiences each person has undergone and to deny one’s past is to deny oneself: ” It was as though I’d learned suddenly to look around corners; images of past humiliations flickered through my head and I saw that they were more than separate experiences. they were me; they defined me. I was my experiences and my experiences were me” (Ellison, 496-97).

As the narrator writes his experiences, he learns the value of increased self-reliance and develops from naiveté and powerlessness to wisdom and authority. He could now see things in a new light and realize how he had been susceptible to betrayal and how there had been some order in his humiliations that he was unable to see earlier. While writing the story he could play with the images of those who had cheated him by characterizing them as buffoons or villains. Bloom observes: “His story is an American form of the human drama. It is a modern rendering of the wound and ….of suffering as not only the experience of pain but also the source of greatness, the creative capacity to transcend suffering” (Bloom, 1999)

Writing his autobiography also helps him understand people for what they are truly worth. For example, it is only when he writes down the speech of Barbee that he could see that the values Barbee articulates are corrupt. Bloom notes: “At several points in the story, the narrator, looking back from the standpoint of his final identity—which he discovers after much painful searching as being totally bound with the experiences he has lived through —reminds us of his first identified as the grandson of a Southern ex-slave” (Bloom, 62).

The main protagonist, through his writing, reveals how he had developed from ignorance to knowledge, understood the meaning of identity and his relationship to the power elite. It would have been to his advantage to end the story at a point where he finds himself wiser than before. But the narrator chooses to give a cyclic ending to his narrative. Writing his life experiences has been another strategy he has experimented with, in order to find his way around figures of authority. But in this strategy, he had depended on himself for the construction of his identity and the story ends before he reenters society. The main protagonist now leaves the reader with the belief that the double consciousness of being both narrator of and participant in his own story empowers him in a way that his earlier duplicity did not.

Works Cited

Ellison, Ralph (1965). The Invisible Man. Penguin Books.

Butler, J. Robert (2000). The Critical Response to Ralph Ellison. Greenwood Press. Westport, CT.

Bloom, Harold (1999). Ralph Ellison. Chelsea House. New York.

Callahan, F. John (2004). Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: A Casebook. Oxford University Press. New York.

Prescott, Orville (1952). A Review of Invisible Man. The New York Times.

Ellison, Waldo Ralph and Gracer, M. David (1996). Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Invisible Man. Research and Education Association.

The first image is the work by Jeff Wall entitled “After ‘Invisible Man’ by Ralph Ellison, the Prologue” created in 2001. The second image goes under the title “The Cave,” and it appeared in the book The Republic by Plato that dates as far back as 380 B.C. Both images have much in common as they are related to literary works, so they allude to certain characters, ideas, and philosophies. At that, these literary works are concerned with people’s search for truth. In Plato’s book, people are exposed to some artificial (manmade) source of light or truth and are confined to using it. Likewise, the man in the postmodern work is also using the artificial light of electric bulbs. The viewer is bound to think of the Invisible Man who tried to find truth in science, which is often in opposition to nature.

The images under analysis also convey one major idea, which is people’s voluntary imprisonment. People in the cave feel comfortable when looking at the shadows shaped by the fire. They are unwilling to go out of the cage where they feel safe. The postmodern world is not marked by considerable changes in this respect. The individual creates his own prison, eagerly encaging himself with material things and technological advances. At the same time, the postmodern world is characterized by hundreds of ideas and approaches to the complexity of human life.

The myriad of bulbs represents the plurality of concepts and philosophies while the people of the Ancient World had only a limited number of perspectives at hand. It is possible to create the allegory of the development of the human society that moved from several basic concepts to a plethora of ideas in the contemporary globalized world.