![]() His only misgivings have to do with the boys he will fight against (they’re rough and hostile), and not with the absurdity of his assignment, though it does briefly occur to him that the battle royal might detract from the dignity of his speech. A faceless person casually explains that, since he has “to be there anyway,” he “might as well take part in the battle royal.” As in a nightmare, he takes this bizarre news in stride, accepting it without question or objection. ![]() As in a nightmare, the narrator opens the door to the ballroom and finds himself in one of the lower circles of hell. The narrator, having delivered a well-praised commencement speech at his high-school graduation, is invited to repeat it at a gathering of the town’s leading white citizens in the ballroom of a grand hotel. “Overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” The old man’s words, Ellison writes, “were like a curse.” “Live with your head in the lion’s mouth,” he says. The narrator’s nightmare begins in earnest in the first chapter, when his grandfather, on his deathbed, gives the narrator an ominous piece of advice. The voice of an invisible man emanates from a dark basement that “is damp and cold like a grave.” The imagery is ghoulish and carnivalesque: We enter this hallucinatory sphere in the opening paragraph of the prologue. Psychologically he is a traitor, to himself, to his people, and to democracy … He is also to be a depiction of a certain type of Negro humanity that operates in the vacuum created by white America in its failure to see Negroes as human.Įllison held true to this mission, though Bellow could have gone a step farther in his criticism: Ellison’s argument is strongest when he abandons the essayistic mode entirely and plunges into the realm of imagination. He will move upward in society through opportunism and submissiveness. The invisible man will move upward through Negro life, coming into contact with its various forms and personality types will operate in the Negro middle class, in the leftwing movement and descend again into the disorganized atmosphere of the Harlem underworld. The most succinct synopsis of Invisible Man comes from Ellison himself, in a letter sent to his literary agent in 1946, just as he was beginning work on the novel: Sixty years after the novel’s publication we still haven’t woken up. In Invisible Man we experience American history as a nightmare. Ellison dramatized, as forcefully as any novelist of the last century, Stephen Dedalus’s vision of history. Saul Bellow, an early and vocal champion of Ellison’s, made the point in a private letter: “I myself distinguish between the parts of the novel that were written and those that were constructed as part of the argument they are not alike in quality.” The sections to which Bellow refers-the speech of the blind preacher, the narrator’s work for the political group known as the Brotherhood, his seduction of Sybil-have aged the least gracefully. In Ellison’s novel, art pauses for protest, which usually takes the form of sermons, speeches, and lectures about race and American history. “I recognize no dichotomy between art and protest,” said Ralph Ellison in his 1955 Paris Review interview, but it is impossible not to recognize this dichotomy in Invisible Man.
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