Title: Invisible Man
Rating: 4 Stars
The novel starts with the unnamed narrator claiming to be invisible, living in an underground room lit with stolen electricity. He then describes how he ended up there.
A promising high school student in the South, he is asked to give a speech to the local white leaders. Before he can give his inspirational speech, he has to participate in a battle royale where he and other young Black men are blindfolded and forced to beat each other. Bruised and bloody, he gives his speech, and as a result receives a new briefcase and a scholarship to a Black college.
A success at the Black college, he's given the plum assignment of driving a wealthy white trustee around campus. This seemingly innocuous assignment turns into a nightmare when he exposes the white trustee to the sordid underbelly of the Black neighborhood. Incensed at his naivete of allowing this to happen, the college president banishes him from the college. The president sends him up to New York City with a handful of sealed letters that will ostensibly introduce the young man to figures of prominence and allow him to work his way back to the college.
However, the sealed letters actually condemn the young man. It's only after he reads the unsealed last letter that he realizes that he's been betrayed. Now nearly penniless, he gets a job at a paint factory. On his first day, he mixes paint with very few instructions. When that unsurprisingly goes bad, he's sent down to the basement boiler room. There he gets into a fight with the other worker. Their inattention to the gauges causes boilers to overheat and explode. He then wakes up in a hospital where he is given electroshock therapy.
Released, he stumbles around Harlem in a daze until taken in by a maternal woman. As he still struggles to find work, he stumbles upon an eviction of an elderly couple. An unruly crowd begins to form. He speaks up and his words inspire the crowd to violent action.
In the ensuing chaos, the narrator escapes but someone catches up to him. Inspired by his words, the man, Brother Jack, encourages him to join something called The Brotherhood. An organization modeled after communism, its mission is to inspire workers of all colors to rise up and revolt. He becomes known for his charismatic speeches. However, another organization, led by a man named Ras the Exhorter, accuses him of just being a Black sellout to an organization dominated by a white power structure.
Eventually, the narrator comes to the same conclusion regarding the Brotherhood. In the meantime, another young Black follower of the Brotherhood has also become disenchanted with it and is now illegally selling dancing Sambo dolls on the street. Caught the police, he fights back and is shot and killed.
As a result of the police killing, nearly all of Harlem is in a state of riot. Having to hide from both the Brotherhood and Ras' forces, the narrator goes around in disguise. Chased, he ends up in a coal bin. Two white men seal him in. Trapped in the underground, the narrator realizes that none of the identities that he has assumed is true to himself. Calling himself an invisible man, he resolves to stay underground until he figures out how to communicate his invisibleness to all of the other invisible people out in the world. By the end of the novel, he is ready to ascend back to the world.
Invisible Man makes many lists of the great novels of the twentieth century. Why?
For one thing, it's a novel that is striving to be more than a so-called 'race novel'. It follows more in the tradition of a picaresque novel. A picaresque novel is the story of a young character that makes his way using his wits in a society that stands against him. Taken right from wiki, properties of a picaresque novel are:
- Told in first person
- The main character is of low class
- There is no plot; just a loosely connected sequence of adventures
- Satire is prominent
By those rules, Invisible Man seems pretty picaresque to me. By writing a novel (especially in 1952) featuring Black characters in a known, defined literary structure, it forces the reader to not just pigeonhole it as a so-called Black novel but to also think of it as part of the overarching stream of literary tradition.
Even so, this novel is about many facets of the Black experience. Here in one novel, you see Black lived experience in the South, in a Black college, being set up to fail at work, being experimented on by medical professionals, being used as a front man for a white organization, and the compromises and sacrifices that a Black man has to make just to exist in a world built for them to fail. However, you also see a maternal woman lovingly tend to a young man, you see young men bond together in a shared sense of mission, and you see the capacity for ambition, power, and leadership that lurks in the narrator's heart.
By the end of the novel, the narrator has cast aside everyone and everything that was trying to force himself into a predetermined role and is willing to stand on his own.
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