I am an invisible man.
”This is the opening line of
Ralph Ellison’s hit novel, Invisible Man. Upon its publication
in 1952, it became an instant success, winning multiple
awards the following year and establishing Ellison as a key
twentieth-century literary figure.
Ellison wrote Invisible Man shortly after the conclusion of
the Harlem Renaissance (1918-1937), a movement in the
United States in which African Americans across
innumerous artistic disciplines collectively produced works
of art inspired by Afrocentric pride and identity. It was a
period of cultural revolution, of discovering and redefining
what it meant to be an African American in the modern
United States. Ellison composed Invisible Man in a similar
revolutionary vein, as a bildungsroman (coming-of-age
story) that deals with self-discovery despite the obstacles
of societal constraints.
In the introduction to the 1980 edition, Ellison explains the
novel was inspired by a fledgling story he’d started writing
in 1945, which was about an African American pilot shot
down over enemy lines during World War II. When captured
and taken to a Nazi prisoner-of-war-camp, the pilot
discovered he held the highest military rank, yet, at the
same time, the lowest social standing. Through the story,
Ellison intended to depict the absurdity of democratic
ideals when manifested in the case of a high-ranking
individual, skilled in a challenging and respectable career
field, yet still considered a second-class citizen because of
race. As Ellison labored over creating the story of his pilot,
he found that another story was taking shape beyond it—
one about a young African American’s quest for identity
and self-definition in a world determined to control and
define him after its own socially-constructed patterns.
Invisible Man opens with the sardonic voice of a
nameless protagonist who has spent years
underground recovering from the emotional,
psychological, and physical turmoil he’d endured
while trying to fit into American society. The society
that had burned and berated him, used him, kept him
running on an endless hamster wheel of unmet
expectations, and never once acknowledged him as a
unique and important soul. Further in the opening, he says,
“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse
to see me.”
With Louis Armstrong’s blues spinning on a record in the
background, the speaker tells the story of his efforts to fit
himself into a world of black and white definitions,
of dos and don’ts, and of rights and wrongs in terms of
socio-cultural rules. Yet it becomes apparent that in striving
to become what everyone wants him to be, the speaker’s
own sense of self diminishes and disappears. No one sees
him—that is, he is invisible—because what people see in
him is nothing but their own projections of what they
presume to see. Even he can’t view himself without their
opinions blurring his vision.
Thus, the speaker’s statement, “I am an invisible man,”
serves to preface every interaction he has with the
characters in the story, all of whom have standards and
expectations for how he should behave. After defining
himself by others’ strict black and white, absolutist rules
throughout the majority of the novel, he later discovers
that his personhood, and the world at large, consists not
only of innumerous shades of grey, but also of
unimaginable colors and lights and unique distinctions. By
the end of the story, he determines that he was never
intended to fit into the confines of a personhood
constructed for him by a factitious social order. And
because of this awareness, his invisibility is then able to
transform into something beautiful—a blank slate that he
can fill however he chooses. Freedom to define himself in
his own way.
