Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The Harlem Riot

The Hole

The Brotherhood

Ralph Ellison

  1. "I am an invisible man. 
No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: 
Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. 
I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids
- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me.”

  2. “It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!” 

  3. “For, like almost everyone else in our country, I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after first being 'for' society and then 'against' it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times. But my world has become one of infinite possibilities. What a phrase - still it's a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn't accept any other; that much I've learned underground. Until some gang succeeds in putting the world in a strait jacket, its definition is possibility.” 

  4. “Whence all this passion towards conformity anyway? Diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you will have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business, they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive towards colorlessness? But seriously and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.” 

  5. "I looked at Ras on his horse and at their handful of guns and recognized the absurdity of the whole night and of the simple yet confoundingly complex arrangement of hope and desire, fear and hate, that had brought me here still running, and knowing now who I was and where I was and knowing too that I had no longer to run for or from the Jacks and the Emersons and the Bledsoes and Nortons, but only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine. . . . And I knew that it was better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others, whether for Ras’s or Jack’s."

  6. “I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.” ​

Questions

Big Questions:
  1. How does his “invisibility” affect this character? What are some of the strategies he uses to deal with it?
  2. What is the irony of him forgetting who he is that helps him remember himself? “I realized I no longer knew my own name”. Chapter 11 “Who are you?” – Why was this a better question for the Invisible Man than “What is your name?”
  3. “When I discover who I am, I will be free.”
  4. How is the narrator both seen and unseen throughout the book?
Character List

CHARACTER LIST 

Major Characters 

The Narrator 
In the Prologue and the Epilogue, he is the Invisible Man. For the central part of the novel, he is a young man, a college student, and an orator in a Communist group known as the Brotherhood. He is evidently a charismatic speaker and an uncompromisingly introspective thinker. He makes a journey in the course of the novel wherein he learns many things about himself and his place in the world, about racism, and about identity. He decides to write down his story so it will be forever preserved. 



Minor Characters (in order of appearance) 

The Grandfather 
The narrator’s grandfather who exists in the novel as a memory. On his deathbed, he told the narrator something that has forever haunted and confused him; he revealed the key to success was destroying the white man by publicly agreeing with him and privately undermining him. 
Dr. Bledsoe 
The president of the Negro College. He is a black man who flatters white men and convinces them of the placidity of blacks in order to get money from them for his college. He expels the narrator from college and undermines his efforts to get a job. He represents the insidious attitude toward young black men of promise that the Invisible Man will one day fight against. 
Reverend Homer A. Barbee 
A blind minister who gives a speech at the Negro College. 
Mr. Norton 
A rich white man who gives money to the black students at the college and prides himself on his benevolence. 
Trueblood 
A black sharecropper who impregnates his own daughter. He is rejected and reprimanded by the black community for his sin, but is strangely embraced and rewarded by the white community. He symbolizes the white man’s desire to keep the black man from improving himself. 


Halley 
A black bartender at the Golden Day who is reluctant to serve Mr. Norton. 
Hester 
A black prostitute at the Golden Day who generalizes that white men are better sexual partners. 
Edna 
A black prostitute at the Golden Day who hates white men. 
Veteran 
A black veteran of World War II who is in a mental asylum, but who speaks the truth about the real motivation behind white philanthropy toward blacks. 
Supercargo 
An attendant for the insane black veterans. 
Crenshaw 
The veteran's nurse. 
Mr. Emerson, Jr. 
The son of an employer who reveals Mr. Bledsoe’s betrayal to the narrator. 
MacDuffy 
The white manager of the Liberty Paint factory. 
Kimbro 
Supervisor at the Liberty Paint factory who shows the narrator how to add a black substance to the paint to make it whiter. 
Brockway 
A black worker at the Liberty Paint factory who sabotages the narrator's work and causes him to get fired and forget who he is. 
Mary Rambo 
A black woman who takes care of the narrator and believes in the efficacy of hard work and honest living for the success of blacks in the United States. 
Brother Jack 
A white leader of the Brotherhood (the Communist Party), who recruits the narrator and then betrays him; he has a glass eye. 
Emma 
Jack's white lover. She is attracted to the narrator. 
Hambro 
A white member of the Brotherhood who advocates the science of communism for analyzing social problems and who denies the value of the individual. 
Tobitt 
A white member of the Brotherhood who is married to a black woman. 
Tod Clifton 
A popular black leader of the Brotherhood who organizes Harlem youth and befriends the narrator. He later abandons the Brotherhood and is shot by a police officer. 
Ras 
A militant black separatist in Harlem. As a Black Nationalist, he opposes the Brotherhood as a white-led invasion of the black community. He becomes an enemy of the narrator and leads a riot at the end of the novel. 
Rinehart 
An unseen Harlem character for whom the narrator is repeatedly mistaken. He represents another invisible man, but one who acts without integrity to get what he wants. 
Sybil 
A white alcoholic woman who is married to a member of the Brotherhood. In the end of the novel, the narrator attempts to use her to undermine the political machinations of the Brotherhood. She uses him for sex. 
Brother Tarp 
A black member of the Brotherhood who tells the narrator he was chained for nineteen years in a Southern prison and who gives the narrator a link of that chain. 
Brother Wrestrum 
A black member of the Brotherhood who is jealous of the narrator's success in organizing. He attempts to organize a purge of the narrator from the Brotherhood, accusing him of self-aggrandizement. 
Maceo 
A white member of the Brotherhood who rejects the narrator. 
Barrelhouse 
A black member of the Brotherhood who is friendly to the narrator upon his return to Harlem. 
Dupre and Scofield 
Black rioters who help the narrator when he is injured in the riot. 
Connections to Larger Society
  • • Choose a group that is invisible in society today. Why do you consider this group invisible? • Invisible to whom? • Are there social reasons for this invisibility? What prevents the group from being seen? • What difficulties does this group face because of being invisible? • What do you want people to know about this group? What would people see if they could see this group? • Are there actions that could be and/or should be taken by the community?