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In an interview Ellison had in Paris in 1954 he was asked whether identity is primarily an American theme, and he answer was: “it is the American theme. The nature of our society is such that we are prevented from knowing who we are. It is still a young society,, and this an integral part of its development.” And that what is his first and last novel “Invisible Man” is about. The novel is about the search one’s identity as an individual and as a part of collective group.
Ralph Ellison started his novel “Invisible Man” with a prologue where he introduced the concept of invisibility and its causes. The protagonist, as a Black man, describes himself as an invisible man; not because of some supernatural reasons or biochemical imbalance but because of society’s rejection to acknowledge his existence as an equal individual who holds the same rights and responsibilities because of his black skin, or more blatantly, his race. Therefore, he chose to stay invisible without revealing his name or identity. This description was a result of the effect of racism and segregation that happened in American back then. Throughout the novel, the protagonist suffered to understand and search for his place and his true identity and in finding a way to overcome the white people’s stereotypical ideas. The narrator confesses his identity on the very first page of the prologue
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am invisible, understand simply because people refuse to see me. … When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me. (3)
In the quotation’s context, the protagonist’s invisibility is related to the white people’s stereotypical ideas towards Black people. Ralph Ellison defines invisibility as a separation from a society where people do not recognize black individuals. (Ellison, 2014: 3).
Ralph Ellison stated in an interview he had with Herbert Mitgang for the New York Time in 1982 that “Once the book was done, it was suggested that the title would be confused with H.G. Wells’s old novel, ‘The Invisible Man,’ but I fought to keep my title because that’s what the book was about.” One can assume that the absence of the article “The” in the title was done on purpose in order to represent Harlem’s ‘Everyman’, who might gone through similar situations as the narrator. The novel is the story of million others like him who, as the novel shows have suffered not only from the Whites stereotyping, but also from elite Blacks too.
All the people who meet Invisible Man through his journey invoke a certain idea of selfhood in him. George Mayberry puts it very clearly:
On the road to invisibility, our pilgrim encounters the Southern small businessman, the Uncle Tom educator, the Northern do-gooder, the Negro military racist, the Harlem messiah with a sideline in numbers, the socio-scientific, highly organized Brothers whose Sisters most frequently discussed the dialectic in the boudoir, a journey that would have left Bunyan’s Christian without care or hope for redemption. Ellison’s solution, with a little aid from Dostoevsky and Kafka, is ingenious and original—perhaps a little too much so of both.
Invisibility, however, may also have positive possibilities, a certain power and a certain freedom in being invisible. In Ellison’s words “I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves….you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds”. (Prologue.2) Moreover, the narrator can be seen to be caught in a duality of existence between the role he is supposed to play for existence and his grasp of who he actually is; which was previously discussed by W.E.B. Du Bois’s in his concept of Double- consciousness.
Furthermore, Ellison tried to portray the theme of Invisibility multiple times in the novel. At first, the protagonist linked his invisibility to electrical power where he managed to steal from Monopolated Light and Power in order to lighten up his hole that he described as “warm and safe” using exactly 1,369 lights. The electric company is aware of its losses but cannot locate their source. In this respect, the narrator proclaims, “And full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt if, there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine… Perhaps you’ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form”. (6) Light confirms the Invisible Man’s reality and gives him his form: “without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well” (5) living in his hole, the narrator fights the abyss of formlessness by embracing the light that renders him invisible.
Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon is an outstanding work about the aftermath of colonialism, but it is also concerned with how race and racism are constructed on the psychological level, both in the individual and the collective unconscious. Fanon argues that once the black man acts and thinks as a white man, he finds himself as a phobic object. Fanon illustrates: “A normal Negro child, having grown up within a normal family, will become abnormal on the slightest contact with the white world” (Fanon 463). He continues: “The Negro is unaware of it as long as his existence is limited to his own environment; but the first encounter with a white man oppresses him with the whole weight of his blackness” (1965:466). For Ellison’s nameless protagonist, these realities occurred to him both before and after moving from his home in the South to Harlem city.
Throughout the prologue, Ellison also links the central character’s invisibility to music. The narrator was passionate about Louis Armstrong’s music in which he declares, “Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music.”Accordingly, the protagonist explains that Armstrong’s invisibility enabled him to produce his art in the same time the narrator’s invisibility allowed him to comprehend Armstrong’s music.
On the opening of the first chapter, the unnamed narrator came to realize, that he had been obedient to the way society thinks he should be because of his race, but here he discovers the existence of his invisible identity. “….That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!” (page 15)
According to James B. Lane in his article entitled “Underground to Manhood” “the invisible man was emasculated and left rootless by people who either paid no attention to his inner existence or visualized him only as a symbol, as abstraction” (64) Maybe the most remarkable example is the scene of the Battle Royal. The Invisible Man has been invited to give his graduation speech to a group of prominent white men. At the event, however, the protagonist is shocked to know that he had to fight a group of other young black students while blindfolded for the amusement of those white. The protagonist realizes for the first time that he is viewed by white people only as a tool for shaping their own visions of the world (Ellison 17). After finishing the battle, the narrator tries to deliver his speech while bleeding, having difficulty to speak the narrator made an error in saying “social equality” instead of “social responsibility” to illustrate the limitations a White, wealthy power-structure place on the Black individual. The speech the Invisible Man delivered granted him a scholarship to a Negro college, “He makes a good speech and some day he’ll lead his people down the proper paths…This is a good, smart boy so to encourage him in the right direction.”7 In this case, the “proper path” and “right direction” for white people were a defection for finding identity. Here Ellison indicated the limitations imposed on Black identity as a result of racism, but he is also invoking important and varying traditions in Black political thought which also give shape to the narrator’s identity.
Ellison attempted to depict the characteristics of the American racism during the twentieth century under the concept of invisibility. In chapter six Dr. Bledsoe the head of university addressed the protagonist by saying “you’re nobody, son. You don’t exist – Can’t you see that?” (120). Hence revealing the social invisibility the Black people were suffering from in American society.
Furthermore, the protagonist struggled to identify himself in the American society. Once again he came to realize his invisibility when he was asked by the lawyer in the Liberty Paints’ hospital: “What is your name… who are you?” (240) the invisible man was unable to answer, he kept asking himself the same question and the thought: “Maybe I was just this blackness and bewilderment and pain”(241). He eventually realizes that blackness unveil his invisibility.
In the chapter twenty three the theme of invisibility appears again when the protagonist was wondering in the streets of Harlem, he was seen as another character called Rinhart when he wore a hat and sunglasses. The invisible man went to the church; he came across a pamphlet written by Rinehart which was about invisibility. After reading it the unnamed narrator concludes that having multiple identities reveals someone’s invisibility and despite the fact that invisibility may provide safety, decisions made in secrecy cannot have any significant impact. In the epilogue the invisible man realizes that his journey was defined by his skin color, meaning that he was seen only as black man. Eventually, he decides to wake up from his hibernation and accept his reality as an invisible man “…. I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man” (573) and to face the society who stood in his face during his journey of self-recognition.
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