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Books by Ralph Ellison
Invisible Man: A Novel
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The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison /
Juneteenth: A Novel /
Shadow and Act /
Flying Home and Others Stories
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Going to The Territory /
Trading Twelves; The Selected Letters of Ralph
Ellison and Albert Murray
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A Black Candide
Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man
(Random House) is a work of much greater seriousness and does
look deeply into the problems of the human heart—or rather,
the human condition. My admiration for it is qualified, which
puts me in a dissident minority: in many quarters it has
received the most high-powered praise accorded to a first novel
in a long time.
Invisible Man might be described as
a picaresque account of a young Negro’s “journey to the end
of the night.” The nameless hero is a kind of black Candide
who—after a series of nightmarish misadventures in which he is
degraded, exploited, and betrayed, perhaps as much by blacks as
by whites—emerges stripped of all illusions and ready to face
the world again, feeling “painful and empty.”
As an adolescent in the South, Ellison’s
protagonist is given a scholarship to a Negro college by the
leading whites in his community; then at the stag smoker to
which he goes to receive the award, he and other Negro boys are
revoltingly humiliated. He is thrown out of college by the Negro
president for letting a white philanthropist, whom he is
chauffeuring, see the seamy side of Negro life. In New York, he
finds after a while that the letters of introduction given him
by the college president are a cruel double-cross, which has
barred him from getting a job. Down and out in Harlem, he is
enrolled in the “Brotherhood” (Communist Party), which for a
time makes a hero of him.
But gradually he discovers that the
Brotherhood is simply exploiting the Negro for its own ends. He
comes to the conclusion that he has always been an “invisible
man”: no one has looked beyond his skin and seen him as an
individual human being. The novel implicitly generalizes the
plight of its protagonist. Its point is that this age, with its
passion for categories and its indifferences to the uniqueness
of the individual, is reducing all of us to a condition of
invisibility.
Unquestionably, Ellison’s book is a
powerfully imagined and written with a savage, wryly humorous
gusto. It contains many scenes which are brought off with great brio
and a striking felicity of detail. To my mind, however, it has
faults that cannot simply be shrugged off—occasional
overwriting, stretches of fuzzy thinking, and a tendency to
waver, confusingly, between realism and surrealism.
Clearly Mr. Ellison is seeking to achieve the effect of
controlled hysteria—and he does; but the results, I feel,
sometimes signify less than meets the eye.
Source: Atlantic Monthly (1952)
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update 11 August 2008 |
