![]() Listening to people and reading novels like this one is perhaps the best I can do. There's even a police shooting of an unarmed black man.Īs a white American I will never fully understand what it's like to be black in America. Much of this level of the novel seems prescient or maybe it just shows how little has changed in 60+ years: white people tell black people what they should believe and what they should do (in education, work, politics, sexuality, etc.), black people must navigate complex social situations of which white people have no clue, black people are invisible in Ellison's sense, and so on. This level of the novel reminds me a lot of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Although Ellison's existential themes can apply to everyone, they apply in a particular way to black Americans. While Camus uses the backdrop of French-colonized Algeria to tell his existentialist stories, Ellison tells a uniquely American story that draws on his experience as a black man in America in the first half of the 20th century. He repeatedly spends several chapters trying to accomplish something only to find he's really been doing something else, often due to intentional deception, but sometimes simply due to his invisibility to himself and others.Įllison, however, is not merely mimicking the European existentialists. In Ellison's novel, the mismatch between what the narrator thinks he's doing and what's actually going on has an acerbic ironic humor. (This humor is almost always lost in Hollywood adaptations of Dick's work, so you have to read the books). Wells's The Invisible Man, which I will rectify soon for comparison), I would also point slightly forward in time to another humorous existentialist: Philip K. As a science fiction fan (who has somehow not read H. I mean this in something like the way that Kafka is funny: existential absurdity is actually pretty funny if you think about it. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the novel for me is that it's sometimes funny. Do any of us really understand ourselves, especially in a world clamoring to understand us from the outside? You might think this would make him a sort of milquetoast character, but he randomly initiates fist fights, yells at strangers, gives impromptu speeches, and does things that I got the sense that he doesn't understand himself. His identity is never made because others are trying to make it for him. But the narrator is none of these things. Washington, a cog in a factory, a taboo lover, a robotic figurehead of the revolution, or a criminal. But the primary motif of the novel is that the narrator is invisible: nobody sees him, they see their own projection of what he should be, whether that's a southern black man idolizing Booker T. Through all of these circles (of hell? This has been called Dantesque!), everyone around the narrator is trying to define him to make him fit their notion of what he should be. The narrator, whose name is intentionally never revealed, moves from a college in the South to a factory in New York City and eventually a political organization (probably Marxist, although it's never explicitly stated, maybe because this was published in 1950's America or for artistic reasons or both). The other is a specific level of a depiction of the complex social experiences of African Americans.Īs an existentialist novel focusing on issues of self identity in a world of people trying to define you, Invisible Man is up there with European existentialist authors like Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Camus. One I would call the general level of existentialist ruminations on identity. Let me focus on two levels, which are by no means mutually exclusive - they in fact interweave and compliment each other. The novel works on multiple levels, some of which I'm sure were invisible to me (especially those more purely artistic levels in the domain of literature professors). I've heard interesting things about Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man over the years as an existentialist meditation on the experience of being black in America, so I made it my choice for 2016. I'm happy to report that it lived up to the hype, even exceeded it. Much like the Grand Canyon or the Taj Mahal are attractions because they're amazing, so is at least some literature deemed classic for good reasons. This is a way to broaden my horizons and to see whether such works live up to the hype. Every summer I try to read at least one work of "classic Literature" (by which I mean the type of thing literature professors assign in literature courses).
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