The unnamed black protagonist of the novel, set between the South in the nineteen-twenties and Harlem in the nineteen-thirties, wrestles with the cognitive dissonance of opportunity served up alongside indignity.
He receives a scholarship to college from a group of white men in his town after engaging in a blindfolded boxing match with other black boys, to the delight of the white spectators. This complicated kind of progress seemed to me to accurately reflect how, for the marginalized in America, choices have never been clear or easy.
I put the book on my syllabus. I was expecting that the class would relate the novel to the current climate of violence toward black bodies. But, as they often did, my students presented a compelling case that broadened the scope of the discussion. Before my time in the classroom, immigration was rarely at the forefront of my consciousness. I did not come from a family of immigrants but from a group of people who had been brought to this country involuntarily, centuries ago.
Ellison pushed black folklore into surrealism and play—both sombre play and the most exuberant shenanigans. Explicitly, he rejected the limited point-of-view strategies of Henry James and the stylized austerity and gruffness of the hard-boiled writers.
Ellison presents American experience with a luscious eloquence and an abandon corralled by a stern sense of form, and the students responded to both the wildness and the control. Eventually, in our culture, where literature is of relatively little importance, and gossip and personality matter enormously, the book may come to suffer by association with the artist who created it. Many people, with a sense of righteousness that we can only wonder at, now disapprove of Ellison.
Born in Oklahoma, in , Ellison knew what it was like to be a black man in both the segregated South and the treacherously half-accepting North. He escaped those jobs, studied music at the Tuskegee Institute for a couple of years, then left for New York to earn money to continue school, but never returned.
In New York, he set up as a writer under the active guidance of Richard Wright. He drew close to the Communist Party in the thirties, during its ambiguous but not entirely dishonorable period of interest in American Negroes as a natural proletariat and therefore as a possible vanguard of revolution.
By degrees, he became disillusioned with the Party and broke with it. Brilliant and handsome, the young man was both lionized and patronized by whites; he knew a great deal about promise, about pride, about humiliation.
He put much of this into his book. He undergoes one bruising encounter after another as he looks for himself among the ambitious, the mad, the defeated. Whatever else it is, the book is an intricately wrought structure of myth and symbol, a novel devoted to initiations, rites of passages, testing, annihilation and rebirth.
He is shaken, enraged, but ready for more. For some it was a national tragedy. For others, it was an embarrassing comedy of ambition. It later served as the model for the black college attended by the narrator in Invisible Man. Ellison also befriended the eminent jazz writer and sociologist Albert Murray, with whom he carried on a lengthy and important literary correspondence, later collected in the book Trading Twelves. The first chapter appeared in America in the volume of Magazine of the Year, and the novel was published in its entirety in Rich in symbolism and metaphor, virtuosic in its use of multiple styles and tones, and steeped in the black experience in America and the human struggle for individuality, the novel spent sixteen weeks on the best-seller list and won the National Book Award in Achieving one of the most sensational debuts of any novel in American history, Invisible Man was hailed by writers such as Saul Bellow and critics such as Irving Howe as a landmark publication; some critics claimed that it was the most important American novel to appear after World War II.
Invisible Man was heavily influenced by the work of a number of twentieth-century French writers known as the existentialists. Existentialism, whose foremost proponents included Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, explored the question of individuality and the nature of meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe. He also engaged powerfully with the tradition of African-American social debate.
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