Quarter 1; Post 1

I am really happy with my choice to read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison this quarter. One of the first things that I picked up on was the lack of a name for the protagonist (first person narrator). You'd think this would make the writing more awkward, especially during dialogue, but it has not at all. In fact, the namelessness is essential to the voice of the narrator. He is, after all, the invisible man. Why would a man who we elect not to see have a name? Of course he doesn't. The novel is written to appear such that the narrator is reflecting on his life, including the reader in on his thoughts about the world. I suspect that Ellison uses his nameless character as a pipeline for his thoughts to the paper. I know a major reader doesn’t read literature as a textbook according to Nabokov and all those other smart people, but Ellison sheds an opinion on race relations in Invisible Man that deserves to be acknowledged for its historical pertinence. 

The point is I am enjoying the book, partially because of my vested interest in the time period (early 20th century) during which it takes place. Anyways, I am only about eighty-five pages in as I am writing this, but here goes on this analyzing game. So far the narrator lays out where he is recounting his life from - his underground, well-lit den, and he has told us about specific events from his younger years. The first notable event, which I predict will become a motif throughout the novel, is his grandfather’s death. His grandfather says, “Son, after I’m gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open” (16). With those words the narrator’s grandfather dies, leaving his family “more alarmed over his last words than over his dying” (16).

The reason I suspect that the “grandfather’s curse” so to speak will play a larger role in the novel is that towards the end of the chapter the narrator has a dream in which his grandfather laughs at the fact that he got his scholarship to college revoked. The narrator “awake with the old man’s laughter ringing in [his] ears” (33). I believe that grandpa’s curse has to do with white people, and his reluctance to stir up trouble with them. He regrets being too complacent, thus he calls himself a “spy in the enemy’s country.” Later in the novel as the narrator is serving as a chauffeur for Mr. Norton, a white founder of the black college, a discussion of fate surfaces. The narrator’s idea that a good fate is not possible comes from “the first person who’d mentioned anything like fate in my presence, my grandfather” (40). I’ll be looking out for the context in which grandpa’s curse comes up in during the novel to see if it means something entirely different, which it may.

Ellison’s style is very literary and smart, but not overbearingly so. For instance he uses an obscure literary device like personification, but it doesn’t disrupt his narrator’s stream of consciousness. Ellison writes, “The room went red as I fell. It was a dream fall, my body languid and fastidious as to where to land until the floor became impatient and smashed up to meet me” (25). A large chunk of chapter two is the story of Jim Trueblood - a local living near the college. After hearing a reality of black life in America, Mr. Norton passes out and is luckily revived by the narrator. I predict that literally saving a white man’s life (80) will come back to haunt him at some point later in the novel. No matter how seemingly pro-black Mr. Norton is, the fact of the matter is that the narrator has pressure on himself to dislike white folks. Mr. Norton is a special case because he started the very college that the narrator attends, putting our narrator at a moral crossroads.