synopsis:

'Invisible Man' is a story told through the eyes of the narrator, a Black man struggling in a White culture. The narrative starts during his college days where he works hard and earns respect from the administration. Dr. Bledsoe, the prominent Black administrator of his school, becomes his mentor. Dr. Bledsoe has achieved success in the White culture which becomes the goals which the narrator seeks to achieve. The narrator's hard work culminates in him being given the privilege of taking Mr. Norton, a White benefactor to the school, on a car ride around the college area. After much persuasion and against his better judgement, the narrator takes Mr. Norton to a run down Black neighborhood. When Dr. Bledsoe found out about the trip the narrator was kicked out of school because he showed Mr. Norton anything less than the ideal Black man. The narrator is shattered, by having the person he idealizes turn on him. Immediately, he travels to New York where he starts his life anew. He joins 'the Brotherhood', a group striving for the betterment of the Black race, an ideal he reveres.

The narrator works hard for 'the Brotherhood' and his efforts are rewarded by being distinguished as the representative of the Harlem district. One of the first people he meets is Brother Tarp, a veteran worker in the Harlem district, who gives the narrator the chain link he broke nineteen years earlier, while freeing himself from being imprisoned. Brother Tarp's imprisonment was for standing up to a White man. He was punished for his defiance and attempt to assert his individuality. Imprisonment robbed him of his identity which he regained by escaping and establishing himself in the Brotherhood. The chain becomes a symbol between the narrator and Brother Tarp because the chain also symbolizes the narrator's experience in college, where he was not physically chained down, but he was restricted to living according to Dr. Bledsoe's rules.

The narrator comes to be convinced that he has been used by people all his life and that this has stripped him of his identity; he has become the invisible man. he assumes many other people's identities trying to discover who he is. Through this he broadens his horizons on many different lifestyles and possibilities, but despite all these possibilities he cannot find satisfaction.

At the end of the novel the narrator continues to fight for his community while 'the brotherhood' shifts its emphasis away from Harlem. He feels betrayed and attempts to destroy 'the brotherhood'. His plan does not work the way he expected it. Instead of destroying 'the Brotherhood', he invokes the people of Harlem to riot. In the riot he falls down a hole where he goes into isolation. While in isolation he is able to contemplate his situation more clearly and ultimately comes to terms with his identity. He realizes that the people or institutions he reveres are as flawed as the system they are fighting. He grows to understand that individuality does not exclude being part of a group. Ultimately, he learned to be an individual for himself.

on this book:

From the moment of its publication in 1952, 'Invisible Man' generated the impact of a cultural tidal wave. Here was a pioneering work of African-American fiction that addressed not only the social, but the psychic and metaphysical, components of racism: the invisibility of a large portion of america's populace and the origins of that invisibility in one people's willed blindness and another's habit of self-concealment.

But Ellison had created far more than a commentary on race. He had attempted to decipher the cruel and beautiful paradox that is America, a country founded on high ideals and cold-blooded betrayals. And he sent his naive hero plunging through almost every stratum of this divided society, from an ivy-covered college in the deep South to the streets of Harlem, from a sharecropper's shack to the floor of a hellish paint factory, from a millionaire's cocktail party to a communist rally, from church jubilees to street riots. Along the way, Ellison's narrator encounters the full range of strategies that African-Americans have used in their struggle for survival and dignity - as well as all the scams, alibis, and naked brutalities that whites have used to keep them in their place.