Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is about a young Black man, whose name is never revealed, who learns he is invisible through his experience of being kicked out of college and moving to New York City to find a job as a speaker to foster the rise of a movement, particularly on housing and women's issues.
My friend and I picked this book for our literary classics book club for February, and I remember really liking the first chapter after reading it for an American literature survey class while I was in college. That chapter is better known as "Battle Royal," and it features a battle to the end to give a speech, and there's a woman who symbolizes the American Dream dancing in front of a lot of men, but she can't be touched. The analysis and deeper meanings from that first chapter grabbed my attention, but I think I wasn't able to be as critical and analytical while reading the full novel.
I think the idea of an anonymous narrator lends to this analysis because it makes this experience more universal than particular to one specific character and one specific Black man. The way I viewed this novel, I also saw it is a critique of race in the United States. I imagined it as seeing that there was no possible way for Black people to create their own American Dream because they are constantly being disenfranchised from (white) people in power, which circles back to the idea of the woman being untouchable.
This book was just okay for me. There were parts that I really liked and wanted to keep reading, and there were parts that I thought I was in the middle of a fever dream and couldn't comprehend what was happening. The plot seemed all over the place, and it just wasn't for me.
Have you read Invisible Man? I'd love to hear your thoughts about the book in the comments!
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