I’ll be honest, even though I’ve never read or seen the H.G. Wells version, that version of a man who is literally turned invisible is so prevalent in our culture that that’s what I thought of when I picked up this book by Ralph Ellison. Even though I had heard about this book and knew it was about racism in America, I had thought the invisibility would play a bigger role as an overt metaphor, but it’s more of a subtle metaphor.
The narrator of the book (who is never named), is a black man who grew up in a small, unnamed town in the American south. After enduring a painful and humiliating hazing ritual by a bunch of white men, he’s awarded a briefcase and a scholarship to an all-black college, which is also never named.
The narrator has been fully brainwashed to believe that “white is right”, and that if he just works hard enough and is respectable enough, White America will accept him and reward him.
But things go horribly wrong one day in his junior year of college when he’s driving a white trustee of the college, Mr. Norton, around campus and makes the mistake of doing what Mr. Norton says when he wants to see one of the huts in which a black man lives with his family. The black man happens to be the least respectable black man you could imagine, but Mr. Norton gets sucked into hearing the man’s story and that leads to a series of unfortunate events, which become disastrous and ultimately end in the narrator’s expulsion from the college. He’s told he’ll be able to come back after things have settled down, but of course that’s not true, but the poor boy is so naive he believes them and it takes a well meaning stranger to disillusion him.
He’s sent to New York City, ostensibly with contacts who will help him get a job, but the “letters of recommendation” he’s sent with are actually letters warning people away from him, so he’s on his own.
When a black couple is forcibly evicted from the apartment they’ve lived in for decades, the narrator speaks out against it and ends up giving an impromptu speech on the dispossession of black people in America. He catches the attention of a white man who goes by Brother John who wants to give the narrator a job as a public speaker for his organization, which is called The Brotherhood. It’s led by a bunch of white men who, in theory, want to lift up the working class, but are just using the narrator for their own ends. They don’t really care about him as a person, which quickly becomes obvious, even as the narrator gets indoctrinated into their belief system.
The narrator continues to work for them for a while, but eventually things come to a head and he is finally disillusioned of them as well when another black man is killed by a cop while selling Sambo dolls. The Brotherhood doesn’t want to recognize the unjust killing because of the offensive dolls he was selling, but he was still a man who didn’t deserve to get gunned down in the street, so the narrator leads a funeral for his fallen friend anyway, and even though he doesn’t want to give a speech, they’re all looking to him as the organizer of the event to give a speech, so he ends up giving one that expresses his anger and frustration.
Then a riot breaks out and some white men chase the narrator into the sewers and trap him down there, at which point he becomes invisible, but at the very end, he also talks about coming out of hibernation, which suggests he might re-reveal himself to the world and take on the injustices of the country again.
While this book was not what I expected, I thought the writing was beautiful. Hopefully some day I’ll be able to go back and reread it because I’m sure there are a lot of things I missed.