![]() ![]() Ever since, it has been a high-school classic and a key African-American book. Invisible Man was an immediate prize-winning success. The novel ends by sharing invisibility: ‘Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?’ But the triumph of the book is the formation of a voice, of invisibility and ‘buggy jiving’, which ultimately becomes authoritative. ![]() His struggles, with social and political pressures, personal humiliations, his state of non-being or ‘hibernation’, form an anxious black comedy. He is also black and a stereotype, invisible by definition. Invisible Man is a figure for the times – an existential hero, a version of Dostoevsky’s underground man, a confidence trickster. ‘I am an invisible man,’ the narration begins. It strangely mixed naturalism, expressionism and surrealism its mood was apocalyptic. In 1952 he published his first novel, Invisible Man, a book startling for its vision, rhetorical verve, and cunningly devised irony. Ralph Ellison is one of the greatest modern African American (or, as he would probably have preferred, American Negro) novelists. ![]()
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