652 The American Century: Literature since 1945Shadow and Act (1964), “but yet thrusting forth its images of hope, human fraternity
and individual self-realization.” “It would use the riches of our speech,” he added,
“the idiomatic expression and the rhetorical flourishes from past periods which we
are still alive among us.” That dream, of a language as diverse as American culture
and African-American life, was realized in Invisible Man: arguably the most pro-
found and compelling novel about identity to be published during this period.
Set in the 1930s, Invisible Man describes the experiences of its anonymous black
protagonist and narrator as he wanders through America, struggling to come to
terms with the dilemma Ellison summed up in one of his essays: “the nature of our
society is such that we are prevented from knowing who we are.” He is “invisible,” he
discovers: his black skin renders him nameless and anonymous in white society.
And, like so many heroes in American fiction, black and white, he is torn between
unsatisfactory alternatives: corresponding, in their own distinctly modernist, racially
inflected way, to the mythic opposition of the clearing and the wilderness. He can
either, he learns, surrender to the various demeaning and degrading roles prescribed
for him by society. Or he can escape into a fluid, formless territory, a subterranean
world that seems to exist outside history where, instead of a repressed, constricted
self, he seems to have no self, no coherent identity at all.
Each stage in the journey of the invisible man, usually marked by a site and a
speech, sees him trying on a new role, a fresh change of clothes and identity. He
begins as a “darky,” subjected to ritual humiliations and the level of a beast – forms of
subjection that Ellison pointedly compares to those suffered by women. This is in the
South, and still in the Southern states he is then offered the chance to become the
“college boy,” following the Booker T. Washington road to success in a segregated
institution. Journeying to New York City, he takes on the role of worker at a factory
called the Liberty Paint Company, whose principal product is a kind of whitewash.
Here, as elsewhere in the book, Ellison moves smoothly between various, very
different stylistic modes as he describes a workplace that is, quite clearly, a paradigm
and parody of American society. Following his factory experience, the invisible man
takes on a new role by joining a group called the Brotherhood in New York. The
Brotherhood is a thinly described version of the Communist Party, and the protagonist
has now become an activist. This role is no more satisfactory than the others, though,
as the continued imagery of games, blueprints, plans, repression, and castration
suggests. The invisible man is still required to deny a crucial part of himself as an
individual, a man, and, above all, a black man. And, at the climax of the narrative,
following a race riot in Harlem, he retreats to an underground sewer, which he
furnishes and lives in while, he tells us, he writes this book. He is now in a “border
area” where he can understand his invisibility and ask us, the readers, the question
that ends the book: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”
What Invisible Man offers as a solution to the unsatisfactory alternatives of the
clearing and the wilderness, a restrictive system and pure chaos, is what the
protagonist realizes. He lives on the edge, a borderland where he can negotiate his
way between the contingencies of history and the compulsions of himself, the fixities
and definites of society and the formless desires of the individual. So, stylistically,GGray_c05.indd 652ray_c 05 .indd 652 8 8/1/2011 7:31:37 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 37 PM