InvisibleMan



Ralph Ellison  Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Lewis Ellision, his father, named his son after the famous American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, telling that he was "raising this boy up to be a poet." While growing up, Ellison began performing on the trumpet during high school years. With the help of a music scolarship, Ellision studied at the Tuskegee Institute in Macon County, Alabama (1933-1936). Ellision dropped out to pursue a career in the visual arts. Ellison moved to New York City to study sculpture, but again abandoned his plans when a change meetings with __[|Langston Hughes]__ and Richard Wright led him to join Federal Writers' Project. He had earlier read the works of Ernest Hemingway, George Bernard Shaw, and T.S. Eliot, which impressed him deeply. Encouraged by [|Richard Wright] he started to write essays, reviews and short stories for various periodicals. Ellison's stories appeared in //New Masses// and other publications. He became an editor of the //Negro Quaterly// and started to work on his novel. In 1946 he married Fanny McConnell. During WW II Ellison served from 1943 to 1945 in the Merchant Marines as a cook, and wrote the first line of //Invisible Man// after the war ended. The early version started with a story about a black American pilot who is in a Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, but soon Ellison found a more complex theme. "Once the book was done, it was suggested that the title would be confused with H.G. Wells's old novel, //The Invisible Man//, but I fought to keep my title because that's what the book was about.'' (Ellison in //The New York Times//, March 1, 1982) After this work, Ellison published two collections of essays. His pieces on jazz drew on his experience as a musician and advocated the idea that in modern society musical traditions blend rapidly with each other. In a writing published in //High Fidelity// (1955) Ellison remarked that "The step from the spirituality of the spirituals to that of the Beethoven of the symphonies or the Bach of the chorales is not as vast as it seems".
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=**"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan 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." (Ellison Chapter 10) **=

The story starts off as the narrator claiming he is invisible.He lives underground, in a basement, unknown. Not as him being some weird creature that you you can't see completely, more as him being someone that no one cares to notice. It is the result of others refusing to notice him because of this skin color. He is black and puts it this way," It is as though other people are sleepwalkers moving though a dream in which I don't appear."(Ellison 109) He struggles though his high school years trying to make others notice and recognize him as a real person. Many times he tries, but fails on trying to make himself an identity because of the racial issues down in the south. One thing he is good at is giving great speeches, and because of this he gets a scholarship to a college. While in college, a man he was working with decided to give him seven letters of recommendation so he could get a job up in Harlem. When he is in Harlem he finds out that the letters are no help. He starts to wonder what is wrong with the letters. After he shows them to a friend, he finds out that that man w ho gave him the letters lied and betrayed him. The letters actually represent the narrator as being dishonest and unreliable. After all that trouble he finds a low paying job but joins a group where he might be able to find his true identity. He soon joins the Brotherhood group which is a black nationalist group. They stand up for black rights and start riots and so forth. He soon realizes that that the only thing he identifies with this groups is being black, and only that. He wanted to join the group to make his own identify but still be part of something like standing up for black rights. He soon realizes that the group is about being a team as one, not yourself. The narrator starts to do his own thing away from the Brotherhood.One day though he receives an anonymous letter warning him to remember his place as a black man in the Brotherhood. He starts to wonder if he should stay in the Brotherhood and stick up for black rights with his group or risk living the Brotherhood and find his true identity as a black man. Read the book for the ending! == **Criticism**



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I liked how the author used the metaphor of being invisible in the book. How he described himself as being unknown in a town full of white people who see him as being an everyday black man instead of his own identity. I also liked how he tried to go though life trying to make himself something something. To become his own person even though he went though many struggles. I also liked how the book made you think hard while reading it.===== There were parts of the story that were very confusing and hard to follow. It was confusing most of the time because the main charter didn't have a name. He was unknown. So half of the time you did't know if they were talking about him or someone else.
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Literary Information


 * Title: Invisible Man
 * Author: Ralph Ellison
 * Type of work: Novel
 * Genre: African American Fiction
 * Time and place written: late 1940-1952 New York
 * Publisher: Random House
 * Theme: Racism as a obstacle in finding your identity