“Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison

Introduction

In 1953, Ralph Ellison (1914-94) was awarded the National Book Award for Invisible Man, his only novel published during his lifetime. Invisible Man uses first-person narration to present the experiences and reflections of the unnamed black protagonist. Set in the 1950s, it begins in the narrator's current home underground and moves backward to his childhood in the rural South and his years at a black state college. Invisible Man is related by an unnamed narrator who reveals that he is an African-American man who is invisible because of an impersonal and indifferent world. While portions of the narration are realistic, a surreal quality pervades much of the novel as events occur chaotically and in rapid succession. The narrator lives in an underground cellar; after introducing his current situation, he explains his experiences moving from the South to the North that led to his present state (Gottesman, p. 52).

Discussion

A prime example of this dissonance that double consciousness creates for the Black American is Ralph Ellison's “Battle Royal,” a short story that became the first chapter of his seminal novel Invisible Man. The story is narrated from the point of view of a young, Black student who has found himself in the good favor of his hometown's White male leaders. This episode demonstrates double consciousness because the nameless narrator is violently affronted by the actual expectations held by the White men who, up until this point, he believed respected him. Despite his academic achievement and the praise they give him before and after the battle royal, his forced participation proves to the narrator that his Blackness is an equalizer that Whites can wield whenever they choose. The narrator has a difficult time reconciling that he is given no greater courtesy than the Black classmates to whom he believes himself ...