Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Synopsis of lecture material, tutorial material and secondary reading

Lecture One:
• Introduction to Ellison’s text as an anti-bildingsroman and an anti-epic (with its anti-hero), in its
modernist experimentation with form, and as an intertextual response to the Great Tradition of English
Literature, African-American literature, American literature and its representation of blackness. The
novel parodies inherited forms.
• “If It’s Optic White, It’s the Right White” (218). This and Liberty Paint’s other advertising slogan
“Keep America Pure” (196) suggest Ellison’s preoccupation with whiteness as an invisible, transparent
normativity, its universalising and hegemonic propensities, as is evident in these corporate products
and his strategic literalisation of the metaphoric and symbolic associations of whiteness and blackness.
It is important to take note of the ten drops of black base added to the tins to make the white paint
‘optic’ (visible/visual) (200) – that whiteness depends on the dialectic of blackness to be white at all, and
that there is no such thing as ‘pure’ white, suggesting that whiteness is an empty signifier.
• The invisible man’s invisibility and anonymity resides in the fact that he is not seen because he is
black, and simultaneously, because he is trying to be white. Notice the very first definition of invisibility
offered by the narrator: it is the result of “a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in
contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their
physical eyes upon reality” (3).
• The structure of the novel: Refuses linearity, teleology. The reader encounters the protagonist at
the end of his anti-epic journey in the Prologue in his basement hiding place surrounded by “l,369
lights” (7), not one of which can illuminate the darkness of his experiences. Dream sequences such as
the one recorded in the Prologue resist the ontological and categorical division between what is ‘real’
and what is ‘imagined’ and suggest the power of the past to engulf the present, especially poignant in
the slave woman’s response to her master, that the necessary condition of becoming “acquainted with
ambivalence” is the inevitable result of the historical fact of slavery (10). Such ambivalence is evident
throughout the narrative, emerging in the powerful rewriting of Enlightenment Reasoning’s “I think,
therefore I am” which becomes “I yam what I am” (266), “I would be no one except myself – whoever
that was” (311), “I was becoming someone else” (335), “and yet I am what they think I am …” (379),
“So now I know where I am, and with whom” (469), “then I may not-see myself as others see-me-not”
(477), and finally, invisible man realises who he is: “images of past humiliations flickered through my
head and I saw that they were more than separate experiences. They were me; they defined me”
(508).

Lecture Two:
• “Yessing them to death and destruction” (564). The possibilities of dissidence through mimicry.
‘Blackface’ and minstrelsy as major trope in Invisible Man. Ellison’s notion of the “mechanical man”, as
described by the veteran: “Already he’s learned to repress no only his emotions but his humanity. He’s
invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir!
The mechanical man!” (94). Significance of the Battle Royal scene in initiating a series of scenes
depicting the dancing Sambo, his limbs controlled by the puppeteer. Invisible man wants to dance the
Sambo dance initially. He wants to perform for the white master. He will “smile and agree” and keep
his “armpits well deodorized” (157). He would be “charming” (164). His college training prepares him to
perform the role, redefined as “Bledsoing” (295).
The Sambo dance is gruesomely parodied in the factory hospital where invisible man performs an
involuntary dance induced by shock treatment is subjected to the standard racist rhetoric emerging in
white American notions of black minstrelsy, “They really do have rhythm” (237).
• Ellison’s discourse on representation (39). The verisimilitude of photographic representation
purports to offer objective truth but all representation is mediated through the eye of the beholder,
reducing black people to signs: “photographs of men and women in wagons drawn by mule teams and
oxen, dressed in black, dusty clothing, people who seemed almost without individuality, a black mob
that seemed to be waiting, looking with blank faces, and among them the inevitable collection of white
men and women in smiles, clear of features, striking, elegant and confident.” See also Bledsoe’s
comment on the power of the media to construct reality (143).
• Deconstructing ‘the American Dream’: the men inhabiting Men’s House mimicking the manners of
Wall Street brokers (256)
• Fragments of the lives of the dispossessed (271-272). Among the debris of the old woman’s life is
a greeting card depicting “what looked like a white man in black-face seated in the door of a cabin
strumming a banjo …”

Lecture Three:
• Meeting the Communists at the Chthonian: Emma’s summation that invisible man is not quite black
enough for the job of spokesperson. His response: “So she doesn’t think I’m black enough. What does
she want, a black-face comedian?” … Maybe she wants to see me sweat coal, tar, ink, shoe polish,
graphite. What was I, a man or a natural resource?” (303). He is also expected to perform his
blackness (312) and sing, according to the racial stereotype, “all colored people sing” (312). Note
invisible man’s response to this incident – his searching for a way beyond black and white, the
individual vs the collective, and the possibility “of being more than a member of a race,” “a way not
limited by black and white” (355). How effective is this? How plausible?
• Trying to get rid of the figurine, symbolic of the difficulty of erasing the past … we drag the past with
us like excess baggage. Description of the figurine (319).
• The rally, and invisible man’s ‘unscientific’ (350) speech (343-344). The symbolic significance of
sight, myopia, blindness, the Cyclops, to be re-visited later with reference to the blindness of Brother
Jack.
• “Plunging outside of history”: Introduction to Ras the Exhorter and his ideology in opposition to the
socialist agenda of the Brotherhood. Brother Tod Clifton as the redeemer (371-377).
Account for Clifton’s choice to plunge outside of history. What is significant about the way he chooses
to live, after the Brotherhood, after Ras? (434-435). See the narrator’s response “Yes, the dolls were
obscene and his act a betrayal” (448) in relation to Clifton’s ventriloquising for the Sambo doll (in italics
on page 432).
• Who records history? What is history? “… it is only the known, the seen, the heard and only those
events that the recorder regards as important that are put down, those lies his keepers keep their
power by” (439).
• Invisible man’s funeral oratory for Tod Clifton (457-458) “the oration of the body of Brutus (465
• The blind eye of Brother Jack. An inability to see ‘race’ (468 and 474)
Study the symbolism in the Harlem race riot scene (Chapter Twenty-Five).
Make notes on all the incidents recorded in relation to the symbolism of black and white, visibility and
invisibility, the individual and the collective.
• “Perhaps the truth is always a lie” (498): Rhinehartism: the trickster in green dark glasses and a
white hat. The Rhinehart Disguise: lover, runner, gambler, briber and man of God (439, 504, 506-7)
• To “overcome them with yeses, undermine them with grins, … agree them to death and
destruction” (508).
• The Rinehart Method, the yessing game. The incident with Sybil, trying to extract information.
“Don’t worry. I rapes real good when I’m drunk” (521). Invisible man redefined as “Anonymous brute ’n
boo’ful buck” (528)
• Epilogue - Living with ambivalence: “too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you
approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce
and I defend and I hate and I love” (580).