From the Lists: #19 Invisible Man

"Number 19? What happened to #20?" you may ask.

I read #20 Native Son (1940) by Richard Wright while in college. In researching this post, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Wright and Ralph Ellison were friends and were writing in Harlem in the years leading up to and following WWII. Both were disillusioned by the treatment of African-Americans by not only the US government and society at large, but also by socialist groups attempting to organize in the 1950s.

Where Native Son relates the inevitability of Bigger Thomas' crimes due to the hopelessness of his environment, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) tells a story of optimism and the slow onset of disillusionment. Ellison creates a first-person narrator who remains nameless throughout the novel. He could be anyone - including you or me. Our narrator is a pleasant, hopeful, intelligent, kind character with a gift for oration. He is the type of character a reader pulls for hoping he will rise above adversity, get the girl after a few setbacks and live happily ever after. But, as with all great literature, there is no happy ending for our invisible man.

Ralph Ellison

While our narrator does all he can to follow the rules thinking that is the only way to get ahead for a poor, Southern African-American boy, he finds himself again and again being cast as the fall guy in other peoples' agendas. Despite doing his best to get along without making waves, our invisible man is blamed, rejected, black-listed, shunned, and used by those he believes are his friends and mentors. Eventually, rather than pulling for the narrator, the reader is exhorting him to run and trust no one - particularly those who seem to want to help.

Upon finishing this novel, I was torn in my feelings. I greatly enjoyed the author's writing style and the narrator was a likable, if gullible, character. It was the "bad" guys who really bothered me the most. Not because of their inherent badness, but more due to their indifference. To them, the narrator is only a means to an end, a convenient scapegoat, a whipping boy, an excuse, or a pawn in a greater plan.

When I consider this, I think of the many people who, like the narrator, find themselves embroiled in the machinations of those with power over their lives. Groups of people who continue to be viewed as less than equal - women, immigrants, gays & lesbians, the homeless, the poor, the uninsured, the unemployed - the list goes on and on. Even worse, I think we have all been the invisible man and the bad guy. How many times have we crawled over the backs of others to get ahead in our competitive society? Made ourselves look better by making someone else look bad? How often do we pretend not to see or hear something or someone who makes us feel uncomfortable? How many times have we dismissively responded to a homeless person that we have no money to spare when we actually do?


I admit, I have been both invisible and incapable of seeing. 

"I am an invisible man.... I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."