I.B. Extended Essay - English: Senior Year High School

26 February 2010
I.B. Extended Essay
English
Is Invisible Man A Racist Novel?

Abstract

The aim of this investigation is to determine if Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man has a racist intent. According to some readers, the novel displays a protagonist attempting to gain social equality while other readers believe it is based on a struggle of hypocrisy and moral idealism. This investigation was undertaken by selecting key events in the novel and analyzing underlying meanings and symbols that are interpreted by readers. The conclusion to this essay asserts that Invisible Man is a racist novel but with a meaningful intent. Ralph Ellison uses forms of racism to further portray the cynical tone of the novel. Stereotypes enhance the meaning Ellison portrays through his work.

Essay

Racism was a philosophy and instrument of affliction that impacted the lives of many Americans during the mid-twentieth century. Ralph Ellison, a world renowned author, published his novel Invisible Man in 1952 at the height of racial unrest in America. This novel was immediately given the title of an American literary classic and has since won Ellison favorable reviews in leading magazines, newspapers, the National Book Award, remained on the best-seller list for sixteen weeks, and is found around the world written in as many as fifteen languages (Sundquist 1). Although Invisible Man has been given positive acclaim as one of the greatest works of modern fiction, the source of its greatness has remained a subject of debate since its publication. Some feel it displays an African- American character attempting to gain social equality while others believe it is based on the struggle of hypocrisy and moral idealism (Sundquist 2). The way Ellison depicts characters in this novel is controversial as well because common stereotypes are portrayed that lead to a greater question: is Invisible Man a racist novel?

The narrator of this novel, never given a name, encounters many people that take him from one societal extreme to another. Characters he confronts range from fanatical African-Americans to racist American Caucasians during the mid 20th century. Actions these characters are involved in are, in a sense, stereotypical to their economic class and race. The contrast of stereotypes attempts to portray life as it was for the narrator during his lifetime in America. The intent of Ellison’s use of characters is viewed as offensive to some which creates debate of whether this novel is racist in nature. Portrayal of race is important to the life of the narrator, the protagonist created by Ellison.

Invisible Man is introduced with the Battle Royal. The protagonist is praised by his community and invited to give a speech at a gathering of the town’s leading Caucasian citizens. When he arrives at the ballroom where he is to give his speech, he is suggested to participate in the battle royal along with his other classmates from school. The narrator and others participating in the battle are pushed into a room with a nude blonde-haired girl before the battle begins. According to the narrator, “There was dead silence. I felt a blast of cold air chill me. I tried to back away, but they were behind and all around me. Some of the boys stood with lowered heads, trembling. I felt a wave of irrational guilt and fear. My teeth chattered, my skin turned to goose flesh, my knees knocked” (Ellison 19).

This pre-battle spectacle is important to the tone of Ellison’s entire scene. This “magnificent blonde” is a young and attractive Caucasian female. During this era in American history, Caucasian females were taboo to an African-American male. The protagonist says, “Yet I was strongly attracted and looked in spite of myself. Had the price of looking been blindness, I would have looked” (Ellison 19). The girl begins to dance and one of the boys faints. “And now a man grabbed a silver pitcher from a table and stepped close as he dashed ice water upon him and stood him up and forced two of us to support him as his head hung and moans issued from his thick bluish lips” (Ellison 20). This scenario illustrates that those who are supposed to be supporting the protagonist and his peers taunt and abuse them with a sexual lure. This representation is brutal to the young African-Americans both physically and mentally. The Caucasian men intentionally taunt the young men in an attempt to create a mental state of desire and subjection which enhances the experience of the battle royal for them; thus explaining the psychology of this interaction. The Caucasian men go beyond physical abuse to forms of sexual and mental abuse; something which can be more detrimental to the characters than physical abuse alone. Unlike physical abuse, emotional abuse takes longer to heal and can cause a completely different outlook on life and the surrounding world.

Consequently, once the battle royal concludes, the ‘boys’ are called to receive their prize. Another abusive encounter is depicted by those in the crowd. A ‘blond’ man calls him ‘Sambo,’ an African- American racial slur, and winks at him to go after the money (Ellison 27). This is portrayed to convince the protagonist he can trust the man and listen to his advice. Incidentally, the blond man is deceitful and leads the narrator into a trap. As described by the protagonist, the rug is electrified and the crowd goes wild watching the African-American men be electrocuted as they fight for their winnings. Mental, sexual, and physical abuse are represented by Caucasians in this confrontation. This delves deeper than simply portraying racism by depicting a scene where the drunken Caucasian men manipulate the young African-Americans. The use of racial epithets characterizes the Caucasian men as “white devils,” a rendition that produces pain and suffering among the African-American men who are only participating in the abuse to earn basics for survival. It is significant to the protagonist because he is there to receive something greater: a scholarship to the all African-American university where he encounters yet another milestone in his journey through life.

While attending the strictly African-American university, the protagonist is a limousine driver for Mr. Norton, one of the school’s highly respected founders. While working this job, the narrator gives Mr. Norton a tour of the grounds surrounding the university. During their trip, the narrator drives by Trueblood’s house where he is seen in the yard. Mr. Norton questions the narrator about Trueblood and the narrator tells him of the problem within the family. The story of Trueblood is mentally devastating to Mr. Norton as shown by his repetition of the questions, “Is it true…I mean did you?” and “You have survived…..But is it true” (Ellison 51)? Mr. Norton becomes emotionally distraught by the story Trueblood gives because his own daughter had passed away due to an illness on a trip to Italy. The story of Trueblood and Mr. Norton’s reaction is important to the contrast between Caucasians vs. African-Americans. Trueblood is characterized as a ‘backward’ and impoverished man that made a life mistake while Mr. Norton is highly respected as a founder of the university. This contrast between race and economic status creates distinct characters with no commonality. Throughout the excursion, Mr. Norton continually reminds the narrator that he is “involved in [Mr. Norton’s] life quite intimately, even though you’ve never seen me before. You are bound to a great dream and to a beautiful monument” (Ellison 43). A connection is created between the protagonist and Mr. Norton but the speaker fails to create one between Mr. Norton and Trueblood. Therefore, this is depicted to show that animosity occurs in an American Caucasian despite what non-prejudice acts he has achieved.

Later in his journey, the narrator moves to New York looking for work and learns about a possible position at Liberty Paints. On his way the company, he crosses a bridge into Long Island and witnesses a massive electrical sign that reads “KEEP AMERICA PURE WITH LIBERTY PAINTS.” When he enters the facility he learns that this company does most of its business with the government. While the narrator follows a boy down an aisle during the tour of the plant he notices “endless cans, buckets and drums labeled with the company’s trademark, a screaming eagle” (Ellison 198). The screaming eagle is an important symbol to racism in America. The eagle is interpreted as screaming because it is proud and strong or it could represent the cry of under-represented classes of Americans ‘screaming’ for freedom. He is given the job of adding droplets to cans of paint. When the protagonist is being trained to add the drops he carefully observes his actions, “Slowly, I measured the glistening black drops, seeing them settle upon the surface and become blacker still, spreading suddenly out to the edges” (Ellison 200). The protagonist replies to a remark stated by Kimbro and is responded by, “White! It’s the purest white that can be found. Nobody makes a paint any whiter. This batch right here is heading for a national monument” (Ellison 202)!

Consequently, contrast between the colors of black and white appears again. These colors are symbolic to the narrator and those he is working with at Liberty Paints. The electric sign reading Liberty Paints’ slogan is important to the characterization of the protagonist’s job at the company. The slogan foreshadows the experiences the protagonist has while working there including the error he makes when adding droplets to paint cans and the labor union incident. This slogan is also a reference to the narrator’s past life. After being kicked out of the university by Mr. Bledsoe and failing to live by his grandfather’s deathbed advice of overcoming Caucasians with yeses, the protagonist references that he has somewhat failed. He is the ‘impurity’ in America as shown by his failure which is enhanced by the color of his skin. This ultimately represents something larger: They’re trying to paint America white by trying to get rid of blackness.

Afterwards, the narrator walks down the sidewalk and observes junk being piled alongside the curb. He stops and joins a group of people forming to watch the scene where several Caucasian men are carrying possessions out of an elderly African-American couples’ home. The narrator hears, “Marshals, hell,” another man said. “Those guys doing all the toting ain’t nothing but trusties. Soon as they get through they’ll lock ‘em up again.” “I don’t care who they are, they got no business putting these old folks out on the sidewalk” (Ellison 269). The Caucasian men are characterized as criminals because they are committing a ‘criminal’ act against the elderly couple and the possibility that they are unlawful criminals.

As the couple’s possessions are being carried to the sidewalk, the elderly woman notices her Bible being carried in a stack of books. She responds by saying, “Take your hands off my Bible!” The man who was carrying her Bible replies, “Look, lady, I don’t want to do this, I have to do it. They sent me up here to do it. If it was left to me, you could stay here till hell freezes over....” (Ellison 269,270). The woman asked to go inside and pray but was adamantly denied. After stating that she was going to enter the building a Caucasian man pushed her back and would not allow her to enter. A member of the crowd responds by saying, “Get that paddie sonofabitch! He struck her!” a West Indian woman screamed into the narrator’s ear. “The filthy brute, he struck her!” As the crowd grows closer to storming the building, the narrator thinks to himself,
“I saw them start up the steps and felt suddenly as though my head would split. I knew that they were about to attack the man and I was both afraid and angry, repelled and fascinated. I both wanted it and feared the consequences, was out-raged and angered at what I saw and yet surged with fear; not for the man or of the consequences of an attack, but of what the sight of violence might release in me” (Ellison 275).

Without thinking, the protagonist responds to the moment by saying “No, no, Black men! Brothers! Black Brothers! That’s not the way. We’re law-abiding. We’re a law-abiding people and a slow-to-anger people” (Ellison 275). The protagonist is characterized as someone who finally takes a stand for what he believes. This is important because, as the protagonist thinks to himself, he is standing for the African-America race and not completely the fact that the elderly couple was being evicted. The crowd of angry African-Americans becomes violent when a Caucasian man pushed the elderly woman away from her home. The Caucasian men were simply doing what they were told to do and following the orders of someone else. This quarrel shows that the protagonist is not concerned about the well-being of the elderly couple but moreover the well-being of the African-American race. This is not an incident involving racial prejudices or any form of racism. The situation is given a racist tone through the narrator’s speech when he addresses the crowd as “Black Brothers” and “Law-abiding people.” This speech creates further agitation between the crowd and the Caucasian men which concludes in a physical conflict. A non-racial incident is created into a ‘hate crime.’

After giving his speech to the crowd, the protagonist joins the Brotherhood where he gives another speech to a crowd of predominantly African-Americans. This speech is similar to the previous which was given to a crowd of rowdy Caucasian men after the battle royal earlier in his journey. The rising action to his speech and the crowd’s response are important to the portrayal of race in the novel because the crowd displays hope of becoming visible and noticed by mainstream America. During the time prior to giving his speech, the protagonist walks around the arena to pass the time and gather his thoughts. He notices a child staring at a huge black and white dog chained to an apple tree. The protagonist recalls, “It was Master, the bulldog; and I was the child who was afraid to touch him, although, panting with heat, he seemed to grin back at me like a fat good-natured man, the saliva roping silvery from his jowls” (Ellison 338). As the crowd began to clap the narrator thought of the dog’s low hoarse growl. He had “barked the same note when angry or when being brought his dinner, when lazily snapping flies, or when tearing and intruder to shreds” (Ellison 338).

The dog is named “Master” because it is symbolic to a slave master. Master was “chained to an apple tree” which is important because, stereotypically, a slave should be ‘chained.’ When the crowd begins to sing and chant, Master growls and becomes angry. These symbols portray race because the African-Americans are no longer ‘chained’ and being held back by American Caucasian society. The “three white men and three black horses” (Ellison 337) are the police and are present to protect the rally instead of ending it. Through this description, African-Americans are being compared to animals and savages.

The protagonist encounters symbolic incidences while giving his speech. He recalls that he was “suddenly blinded and felt myself crash into the man ahead of me” (Ellison 338). As he proceeds toward the microphone remembers it as, “It was as though a semi-transparent curtain had dropped between us, but through which they could see me-for they were applauding-without themselves being seen” (Ellison 341). Ellison depicts the narrator as ‘blind’ before giving his speech because he was unsure of how the crowd would respond to what he was going to say. He was ‘blind’ to what he was going to say and, as he began to give his speech, could not remember what he studied and gave an extemporaneous speech. Ellison creates a connection between the narrator, his father, and a photograph on the wall of the stage by observing a “man so dark and battered that he might have been of any nationality” (Ellison 334). The narrator recalls his father’s story of how he had been “beaten blind in a crooked fight, of the scandal that had been suppressed, and how the fighter had died in a home for the blind” (Ellison 334). Ellison uses ‘blindness’ as a symbol because the narrator is ‘blind’ to his invisibility to society as a black man until, in his speech, he says, “Let’s reclaim our sight; let’s combine and spread our vision. Peep around the corner, there’s a storm coming. Look down the avenue, there’s only one enemy. Can’t you see his face” (Ellison 344)? The narrator’s speech serves as a turning point in his life.

Invisible Man concludes with the Harlem race riot in which the entire city of Harlem is competing in a struggle to end white oppression and gain African-American rights. As the narrator is running through the streets, he encounters “the body hung, white, naked, and horribly feminine from a lamppost…as I steadied long enough to notice the unnatural stiffness of those hanging above me. They were mannequins-“Dummies!’” (Ellison 556). As the narrator stands there Ras the Exhorter sees the narrator and accuses him of being a traitor. Despite the narrator’s pleas, Ras shouts, “Ignore his lying tongue, hang him up to teach the black people a lesson, and theer be no more traitors. No more Uncle Toms. Hang him up theer with them blahsted dummies” (Ellison 557)! Ellison is depicting black on black hostility of those who have a common goal. Until this point in the novel, racial hostilities have not become as violent as to major leaders of equal rights groups becoming violent with one another when the end result would not be remotely similar to their common goal. This depicts that during a time of heated racism, there is also a struggle for power.

If Ras would hang the protagonist, he would not be brought to visibility. The narrator recalls “I was invisible, and hanging would not bring me to visibility, even to their eyes, since they wanted my death not for myself alone but for the chase I’d been on all my life; because of the way I’d run, been run, chased, operated, purged-although to a great extent I could have done nothing else given their blindness and my invisibility” (Ellison 559). The narrator uses the statement “their eyes” to describe that even if he would be hanged, his symbolic death would not show the underlying cause to the problem of racial tensions and prejudices present in society. This means that a black man’s death would not demonstrate the path to racial harmony despite the symbolic nature of the hanging. The narrator goes on to say, “And that I, a little black man with an assumed name, should die because a big black man in his hatred and confusion over the nature of a reality that seemed controlled solely by white men whom I knew to be as blind as he, he was just too much, too outrageously absurd. And I knew that it was better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others…” (Ellison 559). The narrator sees that this hanging as absurd because he notes that Ras the Exhorter and his followers are as blind as a white man. They simply do not understand true invisibility as the narrator experiences it.

The Harlem riot begins to be viewed as possibly not being a failure. He thinks to himself, “If only I could turn around and drop my arms and say “Look, men, give me a break, we’re all black folks together… Nobody cares.’ Though now I knew we cared, they at last cared enough to act-so I thought. If only I could say, “Look, they’ve played a trick on us, the same old trick with new variations – let’s stop running and respect and love one another…” (Ellison 560). The protagonist experiences the Harlem riot as a breakthrough in the Caucasian acknowledgement of African-American strife. The riot shows this because African-Americans are taking a form of action, even if it isn’t the right path.

The protagonist’s journey is concluded by falling into a manhole full of coal. Invisibility is portrayed in this scene when the two men who were questioning the narrator’s contents of his briefcase, look down into the manhole and say, “Maybe. He sure is in the dark though. You can’t even see his eyes” (Ellison 565). Despite this statement showing the narrator’s invisibility, it also depicts a racial slur. A common stereotype of African Americans is that you can only ‘see their eyes in the dark.’ Ellison uses this statement to show that the narrator is still unseen and invisible to American Caucasians, using the two men as examples. The narrator says, “Come on down, Ha! Ha! I’ve had you in my brief case all the time and you didn’t know me then and can’t see me now” (Ellison 566). The novel concludes with, “The end was in the beginning” (Ellison 571). This scene and last line depicts that, despite the racial progress the protagonist has tried to accomplish in his life, he was unsuccessful. Unlike many novels, the ending can be inferred, but is debatable, whether the narrator had not accomplished racial harmony, and, can also be debated that he had more of a devastating impact in Harlem than beneficial. The Harlem race riots were not what he knew to be the correct way of accomplishing visibility. This final episode depicts many stereotypes, most of which are reversed. For example, white mannequins hanging from the poles are symbolic to African American lynchings.

The argument between those who feel Invisible Man is based on the struggle of hypocrisy and moral idealism, as well as those who believe it conveys an African-American character attempting to gain social equality are equally correct in their theories. The fact is that Ellison utilizes stereotypes with the intention of being racist. The intentional racism in this novel instills the harsh reality of race relations in the mid-twentieth century. The use of racial slurs and stereotypical portrayals augment to create the life of the protagonist and how his journey through life is focused around these realities. Invisible Man, in some aspects, portrays race in a deleterious manner but is constructive in the portrayal of life as it was for a more-than-ordinary African-American in mid 20th century.

Works Cited

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, Inc., 1980.

Sundquist, Eric J. Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Boston: Bedford Books,1995.