Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison has the Best Narrator in English

 

Please read this book?

If you like sharply-drawn, illuminated characters, read this book. If you like thrilling and natural plots, read this book. If you like social commentary that even today rings out like a cymbal: read this book. If you like brilliant narrative voice, strong and haunting motifs, coming of age stories, musical prose—

If you, like me, were assigned to read Ralph Ellison’s “On Bird, Bird-Watching and Jazz” for AP Language & Composition, promptly discovered that Ellison was the best nonfiction prose writer in the whole English language but waited half a year to pick up anything else by him for fear of being disillusioned, only to realize that the only illusions about him were the ones you created by worrying: read this book.

Perhaps that advice is a little narrow. 

Let’s start again.

“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” (3)

Ralph Ellison’s 1947 novel Invisible Man is the coming-of-age story of a young Black man in the early 20th century, told in flashback from the safety of a sewer where the unnamed narrator is hiding out (don’t worry, no Hugoesque tangents here). He recounts his youth in a small Southern town, his formal education at a Black College and his practical education in Harlem, where he joins a revolutionary group called the Brotherhood. Eventually, he realizes that no institution or theory—from the uplift suasion of the college’s sanctified Founder to the Black nationalism of Harlem agitator Ras the Exhorter—is capable of seeing him as an individual.

Which is a shame, because Ellison’s anonymous protagonist is the best narrator in the English language (yes, better than Humbert Humbert, or at least less despicable and just as eloquent). He’s a little vain, a little angry, hopeful and weary at the worst times but devastatingly smart throughout. By the end of the story, as he learns to see himself and the world around him clearly, I was cheering.

“I faced them knowing hat the madman in a foreign costume was real and yet unreal, knowing that he wanted my life, that he held me responsible for all the nights and days and all the suffering and for all that which I was incapable of controlling, and I no hero, but short and dark with only a certain eloquence and a bottomless capacity for being a fool to mark me from the rest; saw them, recognized them at last as those whom I had failed and of whom I was now, just now, a leader, through leading them, running ahead of them, only in the stripping away of my illusionment”

Heck yeah! Self-actualize!

The story itself is great too, set in a bright, harsh and plausible America under a “veiled sun” of hope and ignorance (450). Every locale is a well-evoked symbol, and every episode contributes and reframes the story’s themes, from the famous “Battle Royale” sequence in the novel’s beginning to the race riot at its end.

Invisible Man is about 570 pags long, and I know that sounds like a lot to get through, but the plot flies by. If you haven’t read a big book in years: read this book. If you’ve read nothing but slow-paced tomes: read this book. If you’ve been assigned Invisible Man in school and are frantically scrolling through online reviews: read this book, not only to please your teacher but because this book is really great. If you’re looking for something to read this February—or March or April or any other month of the year—read this book. If you’re nervous, confused, sad or anything else: read this book. Whatever your age, color, gender, sexuality or philosophy: read this book.

Please. Listen.

“Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (572)

P.S. Incidentally, this is the third in a trilogy of “favorite books where a character has a glass eye,” along with Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr. I don’t know why this is, but it sure is a great symbol!