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Loading... Invisible Manby Ralph Ellison
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  samfsmith | Jan 24, 2010 |  Engrossing work, beautifully written. (  ) jwcooper3 | Nov 15, 2009 | Maybe this is one of those books that really is better to be gone over in literature class, or maybe I'm just slow, but I sure didn't understand much. The prologue was sheer brilliance; after that things just got weird. A nameless African-American narrator describes his journey from ambitious college student to disillusioned hermit, encountering a series of bizarre characters along the way. From reading other reviews I understand that most of these characters are meant to represent certain groups or archetypes, but aside from the communist Brotherhood I missed the references. I'm not sure that mattered, though, after reading the epilogue, which just rehashed the points I did grasp. I tried to just go with the flow but far too often my response to this book was, "Wait, what?" (  )1  melydia | Oct 28, 2009 | Another classic work that I managed to put down. (  ) dresdnhope | Oct 14, 2009 | The Invisible Man made me more aware about how it feels to be unseen and mistreated. I was raised during the 60s and 70s... there was prejudice and stereotyping. Today racial matters still exist, but there is a definite change in societal views. I remember when interracial couples where seldom scene ... today I have mixed race family and friends and I think nothing of it. A person should rightly be judged by their actions not the color of their skin. The cultural world Ellison wrote about can be compared to the world today by considering the span between day and night ... black and white. Even so there are still "invisible" people out there. I once heard a John Prine song that made me realize how lonely some people can be. He reminded me to say “hello” to the elderly. The senior generation often feels forgotten and left out; then there are homeless people, who have lost hope. We all need to consider the basic human need to be acknowledged and valued. Get together and love your brother. (  )1 SFM13 | Oct 7, 2009 | 
 this is the kind of multi-layered literary and philosophical performance that we, as citizens concerned about the health of our republic, are obliged to re-read every ten or twenty years in order to check its insights and monitions against our cultural (and personal) progress and failures.  "Invisible Man" is tough, brutal and sensational. It is uneven in quality. But it blazes with authentic talent.
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As the book gets started, the narrator is expelled from his Southern Negro college for inadvertently showing a white trustee the reality of black life in the south, including an incestuous farmer and a rural whorehouse. The college director chastises him: "Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie! What kind of an education are you getting around here?" Mystified, the narrator moves north to New York City, where the truth, at least as he perceives it, is dealt another blow when he learns that his former headmaster's recommendation letters are, in fact, letters of condemnation.
What ensues is a search for what truth actually is, which proves to be supremely elusive. The narrator becomes a spokesman for a mixed-race band of social activists called "The Brotherhood" and believes he is fighting for equality. Once again, he realizes he's been duped into believing what he thought was the truth, when in fact it is only another variation. Of the Brothers, he eventually discerns: "They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves.... Here I thought they 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."
Invisible Man is certainly a book about race in America, and sadly enough, few of the problems it chronicles have disappeared even now. But Ellison's first novel transcends such a narrow definition. It's also a book about the human race stumbling down the path to identity, challenged and successful to varying degrees. None of us can ever be sure of the truth beyond ourselves, and possibly not even there. The world is a tricky place, and no one knows this better than the invisible man, who leaves us with these chilling, provocative words: "And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" --Melanie Rehak
(retrieved from Amazon Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:43:57 -0500)
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My advice, if you are reading this edition, is to skip the introduction – read it later if you want to. The author does quite a bit of pontificating.
The novel also is somewhat heavy-handed with the symbolism. Everything is a symbol, or can be viewed as a symbol. That gets old quickly, especially when it is so obvious. (