The meaning of the title is the theme of the book. The title means that the hero, a young black man from the American South, is “invisible” in the sense that American society cannot see him for what he is — a human being. America sees him as a dangerous animal, an apparition, a threat, an ideology, or a demon. America cannot see him simply as a man, with the complexities, fears, hopes and sufferings that every young man has. It’s not so much an accusation as a cry of protest.
This is a Bildungsroman. But unlike most comparable novels in the western canon, its hero, in line with the title, has no name. He is given no name because society will not allow him to possess a human identity. He is simply “I,” the narrator. The bulk of the action takes place in the Harlem of the 1930’s and 40’s.
I’m going to summarize the plot by cutting it down to its bare essentials; those who desire the full (and mostly violent) details are welcome to read the book. In summary: a talented young black man from the south migrates to New York City to seek his fortune. The young man’s talent happens to be in oratory; he has won a prize by giving a memorized speech on citizenship before a social-service club of white businessmen in his southern city.
In New York, after violent adventures in the lower levels of the industrial labor force, the young man gravitates to the Communist Party (thinly disguised as “the Brotherhood”). A Party operative named “Jack” happens to witness the hero giving a spontaneous public speech against evictions. Impressed, “Jack” (all Party members are identified only by the Party names, as was the practice back then) invites the hero to become a candidate member of the Party and sends him to be indoctrinated. Soon, the hero becomes a highly popular street-level orator for the Party in Harlem. He comes into conflict with another local orator, “Ras the Exhorter,” a Garveyite black nationalist. In this political struggle we encounter the ideological core of the novel. Ras argues that the black people should base their ideology simply and solely on their race. Blackness is all, Ras contends. You will never get anything from white society and you shouldn’t. The hero, as a Communist, believes in the brotherhood of man. He seeks to develop the political consciousness of black people to a level where they can participate as equals in the Revolution, which will usher in an era of perfect equality. These two ideologies — Black Nationalism and Communism — are incompatible. In “Invisible Man,” the two ideologies fight it out on the streets of Harlem. Meanwhile, the hero is getting into difficulties with his Communist masters. He realizes that he is being used. He apprehends that the Party is, in fact, no different than the old south. It is run by white “massas” just as surely as the Dixie the hero had hoped to leave behind. Not only that, but as political conflict in the larger society gradually comes to a head, the hero realizes that the Party leaders know nothing about what is happening in Harlem, and do not care. Their focus is on some faraway European conflict of which the hero knows nothing.
In the denouement, a race riot occurs, in which both Ras and the hero participate. The hero helps burn down a white-owned apartment building. Ras arms himself with a spear and a shield and rides around Harlem on a horse. The two men encounter each other amid the flaming streets. Ras condemns the hero as a traitor to his race. The hero answers, “I am an American!” The two men engage in mortal combat. The hero wins, but he is hounded by Ras’s supporters to the point where he has to hide in a coal bin. Trapped underground, he ponders his fate and the fate of America, his beloved country.
As a result of this novel, as everyone knows, Ralph Ellison became world famous and a major prophet of the liberal movement in America. But I do not wish to dwell on that. I would rather devote a few closing words to certain literary aspects of “Invisible Man,” aspects that Ellison himself considered important.
One such aspect is the role of music in the novel. In real life, Ralph Ellison was a talented musician, like his parents before him. He attended college on a music scholarship, and never lost his love for jazz and the classics. The novel’s title, aside from its obvious political message, also sends us a subtler message, an auditory one. What it tells us is, don’t just look. Listen. The nature of man and society is not only in what you see; it’s also in what you hear. Careful readers of the novel will notice the recurring presence of passages of jazz music, snatches of song, and the wishes of people that they could sing. In the novel, when the hero is down in the coal hole, he cannot see anything, but he can still hear the sounds of city life going on above him. This important auditory aspect of Ellison’s writing reminds us of his literary forebears and inheritors, such as T. S. Eliot (to whose “Waste Land,” a poem of pure sound, Ellison acknowledged a particular debt) and James Baldwin, whose prose is powered by the majestic simplicity of the hymns of the black church.
The other striking aspect of “Invisible Man” on which I feel impelled to comment is the role of women. This aspect is worthy of an essay in itself. (As a matter of fact, I think I just might write one.) The only two women in the novel are Mary, the older Harlem landlady who takes the hero under her wing when he first arrives in New York, and the beautiful white Party member who seduces him just before his final apotheosis in the race riot. Mary is a mother-figure who nurses the hero back to health after his injury in the paint factory explosion at the beginning of his sojourn in New York. Mary not only nurtures the hero, but she quietly forces him to confront his destiny. She appears in the novel as an apolitical symbol of human decency.
The alluring, alcoholic Party member is a different kettle of fish entirely. The wife of a high Party official, she is utterly bored by politics. She drinks and entertains to drown her boredom. (It’s interesting to note that these high Party officials are wealthy aristocrats who dwell in expensive apartments in the richest neighborhoods of Manhattan — a recurring feature of American radicalism then and now.)
That’s it. Those two women are the total female content of “Invisible Man.” And that speaks volumes about the real ideological content of this novel and of the civil rights movement which it helped to launch. It speaks volumes about the place, or lack of place, of women in the movement even today. The political theater of war portrayed in this novel is a battlefield of men, and only men. Women are complete political zeroes. One is reminded of Melville’s works (another acknowledged influence on Ellison), where mighty issues of destiny and morality play out in a world that is exclusively male. One wonders whether the relative eclipse of Ralph Ellison’s literary reputation in latter years may perhaps be traced to this aspect of his work. This aspect renders Ellison’s classic novel problematic for the modern world, in which, as we have seen with Alice Walker, women seek a place on the literary and political stage where the New America is being played out.