Ralph Ellison an American novelist, literary critic, and scholar is best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. A story of a black man and collegeeducated stuck in a vendetta between a racially divided society, trying to overcome and succeed in the stigma that a black man is simply invisible. The novel follows The Invisible Man’s through a journey “from Purpose to Passion to Perception” (Ellison), by introducing series of flashbacks taking the form of dreams or memories.
Ellison allows for fictional scenes to come to life and bring the book together as a whole through a very delicate balance of declarative sentences, symbolism, and gender roles. The novel has many achievements, but it’s greatest achievements is propitiously ceding the character’s (narrator’s) emotional and dreamlike memories to picturesque deceptions of what is supposed to be reality of battle royal. The remembrances of the narrator are often declarative sentences using the first-person pronoun “I was naive.
I was looking for myself” (Ellison prologue). Through the thoughts of the Invisible Man we learn the guilt and confusion, the narrator feels because he senses that he as disgraced his grandfather’s advice “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” (Ellison prologue) because he misunderstood the demeaning intentions of the white establishment. Notwithstanding, the battle royal delineation creating a place and setting.
Ellison straightforward description of the “large room with a high ceiling. Chairs were arranged in neat rows around three sides of portable boxing ring. The fourth side was clear, revealing a gleaming space of polishes floor. ” (Ellison 17) allow for the use of h metaphors and similes to allow for the introduction of the awful and strange essences of what is actually happening, being blindfolded “like blind cautious crabs,” and their fists “testing the air like the knobbed feelers of hypersensitive snails.
The blond nude dancer of “a circus kewpie dolls,” and her breasts “round like the domes of East Indian temples” (Ellison 20). The descriptions of the boxing ring scenes are particularly effective, by using phrase that take us from picture to picture to portray the chaos and commotion of the blindfolded match, “the room spun round me, a swirl of lights, smoke, sweating bodies surrounded by tense white faces”.
This excessive use of rhetorical style of elevated speech, that makes fun of the agitated writing of the genre “we of the younger generation extol the wisdom of the great leader and educator who first spoke these flaming words of wisdom”. The battle royal symbolizes the struggle for power in social and politics, the narrator learns that life is a struggle, even though he agrees with the philosophy of Booker T. Washington that through education and industry blacks can achieve success.
Symbolically, the theme of struggle is introduced among blacks for an evasive prize that remained out of reach. Capital to struggle are issues of race, class, and gender, which are concepts that need to be acknowledge before the narrator can address and cope his identity- a black man in white America. Ellison uses two powerful elements to symbolize and present his message of blacks are imperative to live in segregation and denied their rights, white blindfolds and the brass tokens. The white blindfolds represents the invisible man being blinded by white.
The tokens mean to convey a worthless and empty gesture of tokenism- introducing a few blacks into a white society and not granting all blacks equality and social responsibility. Ellison is not limited to symbolic language, when presenting the narrator Ellison introduces him through the tradition, of black social debate. Placing speech within the text of this chapter, he is able to criticize and question the stated belief of the optimistic social program to the black educator and writer Booker T. Washington.
Even though Ellison doesn’t directly quote Washington he uses long quotations from the Atlanta Exposition Address of 1895 emphasizes industrial education, where he believed that blacks should direct their energy towards economic success instead of political and civil rights; believing that if they worked hard enough then whites would grant them equality, which is shown when the narrator continues his graduation speech even though he was being mocked and unheard, to prove to the whites that he is educated and with be successful.
This philosophy is however faulted when Ellison introduces a successful black businessman, even though he his successful, is prone and susceptible to racial prejudice as those less successful. This counterargument is shown when Ellison introduces the narrator’s grandfather who believed that this ideology has major limitations, which is made even more dramatic when the white audience humiliates the narrator when speaking of sections in Washington’s speech. Ellison then harshly implies that the racist whites will not accept Washington’s ideology or upstanding black citizens.
The narrator slipped the words “social equality” (Ellison 31) and causing the men an incendiary reaction because of the notion they so strongly reject (social equality), forced the narrator to substitute the phrase with “social responsibility” (Ellison 31), underlining Ellison’s point. The limitations in Washington’s philosophy: “Education of head, hand, and heart, you will find that they will buy your surplus land, make blossom the waste places in your fields, and run your factories.
While doing this, you can be sure in the future, as in the past, that you and your families will be surrounded by the most patient, faithful, lawabiding, and unresentful people that the world has seen. ” is yet again proven when the men act with indulgence when the narrator embarks their idea of the ideal black man, showing their true feelings when feeling threatened about white supremacy. Women’s roles in the Invisible Man are used to give clear cut understand of the point the narrator is trying to make, which explains why any women in the book are viewed as temptresses. Ralph Ellison’s view on women greatly influences the narrator’s idea of them. Ellison’s relationship with women have lead him to the conclusion that women are cunning, fickle prostitutes. The narrator on the other hand sees them as object used for one’s desire. The women encounter we come with is the white-blonde stripper in the battle royal, seen as nothing more than an object to tempt the boys into fighting.
Emma (white), Brother Jack’s mistress a sexual object. Sybil (white), a female whose idea of a black man is savage, who wanted to act out a “rape” fantasy with the narrator because of the label she has set on them. Kate and Mattie Lou, two black women that are oppressed or controlled by all men in their lives and are living in poverty. The bar ladies where one gets attracted to Mr. Norton. Mary one of the very few black women who is respected by the narrator, because she took him in to help him out not for sexual pleasure.
Both white genders in the Invisible Man reflect the prejudice stereotypes forced by the American male. Invisible women reach about the nonexistent qualities reflected in the American society that distract away from the racial minorities, but this does not mean that blacks and women obtain invisibility as “Hollywood ectoplasms”; rather happens when people see the stereotypes and not the person (Ellison 3). “Behind every great man, is a woman” is echoed in the Invisible Man. Society belittles and degrades women treating them less than human, like the narrator.
The encounters of women may come across as insignificant, close consultation shows that the position women have are actually in effect with the helping of evolving the narrator, with realizing the ground truths of his invisibility, manipulation, belittling, responsibility, liberty. The lack of voice given to the early 20th century African American novels both black and female experiences have been muted creating gender inequality. Deborah McDowell says “a revisionist mission aimed at substituting reality for stereotype” (284). Reading the Invisible
Man one can assume the African American male is of dominance and superiority of the African American female, which is one of the very few if not the only common fact they have with white Americans; gender inequality. Mr. Norton represents the white and says he wants to improve the black communities status does not however ask about Mary-Lou’s welfare but instead is more interested by the rape and eagerly ask Jim Trueblood “[to] go where there is shade” for Trueblood to share the stories with him (Ellison 47). Mr. Norton is as fascinated by is deceased daughter as Trueblood is by his.
Mr. Norton describes his daughter as: She was a being more rare, more beautiful, purer, more perfect and more delicate than the wildest dream of a poet. I could never believe her to b flesh and blood. Her beauty was a well-spring of purest waterof-life, and to look upon her was to drink and drink again… She was rare, a perfect creation, a work of purest art. A delicate flower that bloomed in the liquid light of the moon. A nature not of this world, a personality like that of some biblical maiden, gracious and queenly.
I found it difficult to believe her my own… (39). When using Jim Trueblood’s story of his daughter to create a gateway for his forbidden sexual fantasy to project in; which highlights Mary-Lou’s invisibility and insignificant, being incapable of getting help from either community, the white and her own community. Having the power Jim Trueblood poses over Mary-Lou’s invisibility and rape further exemplifies the power and superiority the whites poses over the black community, which be indirectly linked.
The power that the white community appall through dehumanizing behavior without moral value over the narrator can also be seen through the power Jim Trueblood exerts on his wife and daughter. The brothel where old black veterans gather known as the Golden Day, Mr. Norton was riding with the Invisible Man because of the shock he got from Jim Trublood’s family, another invisibility example imposed on the blacks and females in the novel. Ellison has again avoided giving an identity – first namesfor most black women prostitutes to elucidate their position in society and lack of individuality.
Even the women who do carry names -Edna, Charlene, and Hester- are brutalized for their profession. The description the narrator gives uses superficially attributes” … Women in short, tight-fitting, stiffly starched gingham aprons” (Ellison 64). Ellison has successfully illustrated the intricacy of being an African American man during a prejudice and injustice racial era, whom believed that it was their prerogative to give visibility or invisibility to the African Americans. Disappointingly he failed to fully develop the complexity of an African American woman living at the same time.
