Ralph Ellison and
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a
spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan
Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywoodmovie ectoplasms. 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 simply
because people refuse to see me.
Homework
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Respond to the following quote in a well
developed paragraph (5-8 sentences).
–I am invisible simply
because people refuse to
see me.
Central Question of the Novel
“How can one person make a difference
when all of the avenues to power are
occupied by the duplicitous?”
 No matter where the narrator tries to
pursue success and autonomy in an
authentic manner, he finds the road ahead
of him blocked by those who have decided
to collude against those below. His initial
solution, to hide in a basement and steal
power from the electric company, fails to
solve the problem, so he ultimately
decides to come forth and pursue change.
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Ellison’s Bio (1914-1994)
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b. in OK frontier
Named for Ralph Waldo
Emerson
Attended Tuskegee Institute in
Alabama
1930s: Harlem Renaissance
(corresponded with the Jazz
Age)
1945: began writing
7 years total to complete
Won the national book award
Ellison’s first and only novel
Novel was immensely popular
with both whites and blacks
Episodic Novel
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Def: story is told in a series of incidents or
events.
The episodes succeed each other, with no
particular arrangement
Protagonist experiences a string of occurrences
and events
Characterized by a loosely connected string of
incidents
Main character has no name: the nature of
these experiences and the cumulative effect on
him is important
Bildungsroman Novel
Def.- a coming of age novel which
chronicles a character’s development and
maturation over the span of several years
 Main character begins as a bright high
school student and matures to a man who
understands the nature of the world
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Universal Novel
Novel is a quest to know oneself
 Struggle for acceptance
 Although it concerns race, it is really about
our desire to succeed and be happy in life
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Ellison as a Symbolist
Events are in real settings, but settings
always stand for something beyond
surface level
 North vs. South
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Existentialism Vs. Naturalism
Narrator struggles to find his identity
(Existentialism)
 This process is impeded by the world he
lives in (Naturalism)
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The Narrator’s Speech
Comes from a speech given by Booker T.
Washington at the 1895 Atlanta Exposition
 Also known as:
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– The Atlanta Compromise Speech
– The “Cast Your Bucket” speech
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Urged blacks to learn manual labor and
soothed the white community’s fears of
black rebellion
– Assimilation, cooperation
Debate Within the Black
Community
Booker T. Washington
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Booker T. Washington
– Assimilation
– Manual Labor
– Blacks must learn to
live within the racist
order of the South
W.E.B. DuBois
•
W.E.B. DuBois
– Criticized
Washington for what
he viewed as giving
in and submitting to
the white culture
– Blacks must resist
the racist order of
the South
Ralph Ellison and Black
Modernism
❑ Invisible Man reflected an experimental
attitude, combining social responsibility,
writing craft, and technical rigor of narrative,
beyond the typical "protest" novel
❑ Inspired by writings of Marx, Hemingway,
Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Richard
Wright, and Freud
❑ Inspired by jazz and blues music
❑ His style departed from that of Richard Wright
in that his characters were articulate, educated
and self-aware
Existentialism and Invisible Man
Existentialisms:
 Developed throughout the nineteenth
(Kierkegaard, Nietzsche) and twentieth
(Jean Paul Sartre) centuries
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Famous existential novelists: Dostoevsky,
Kafka, Camus
A philosophical movement
embracing the view that the
suffering individual must create
meaning in an unknowable,
chaotic, and seemingly empty
universe.
A philosophy that
emphasizes the uniqueness
and isolation of the
individual experience in a
hostile or indifferent
universe, regards human
existence as unexplainable,
and stresses freedom of
choice and responsibility for
the consequences of one’s
acts.
Existentialism is a philosophical
movement in which individual
human beings are understood
as having full responsibility for
creating the meanings of their
own lives. . .
Ralph Ellison explains in
Shadow and the Act that life is
open-ended and ambiguous,
and literature must be similarly
ambiguous and open-ended. Life
does not follow rules or laws;
neither should literature.
According to Ellison, Invisible
Man makes his final discoveries
about himself through the
process of telling his story.
Contemporary problems in racial relations are
reflected in the following ways:
The taboo of white-black romantic relationships
is reflected in two ways: the white woman who
appears before the “battle royal” as well as the
tryst between Sybil and the narrator.
 Black power figures were often seen by other
blacks as conspirators with whites. Dr. Bledsoe
ultimately reveals himself as this sort of person
in two ways: his letters urging the trustees to
avoid the narrator and his conversation with the
narrator before sending the narrator to New
York City.
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