483. Invisible Man

Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
1952
Around 580 pages

It's so depressing how relevant this novel is. I wish it read more like Memoirs of a Hadrian, where the world is so unrecognizable that it might as well have taken place on another planet. It would be hard to write a novel like this without wallowing in misery, but somehow Ellison is able to avoid this. 

I tend to get annoyed with the "unnamed narrator trope" but I can't deny that it works here. After all, he's an invisible man. Our narrator is a black man that receives a scholarship to an all black college, but is forced to participate in a human cockfight in front of the white donators to get it. His life is marked with all the indignities and injustices that characterize the Black experience in America.

I was amazed by how many cultural nuances he managed to capture without feeling like he's manically stuffing every stereotype in his bag at the racism clearance sale. The scholarship scene perfectly captures the fetishization of Black bodies and the humiliation that comes with white people's charity. We also get police brutality, mob scenes, and everything else that makes my heart hurt.

Native Son paved the way for a story like this, and I think I enjoyed that novel more. But this felt more hopeful, whereas Native Son felt depressingly inevitable. For that, I admire Ellison's work more than Wright's. 

RATING: *****

Interesting Facts:

Won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, making Ellison the first African American writer to win the award.

Barack Obama modeled his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father on Ellison's novel.

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