The words still seep into the reader's marrow, 42 years after they were first ( published. "I am an invisible man," Ralph Ellison declared in the opening sentence of his only novel. "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." If they do register his presence, it is as "a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy."
Invisible Man, in which a young black relates the surreal events leading to his ultimate isolation, earned best-novel-of-its-time raves from the college of critics. It established Ellison in the permanent firmament of American writers, a place he still occupied at his death last week from pancreatic cancer, six weeks after his 80th birthday. But Invisible Man was more than a gorgeously written piece of fiction. Because its phantasmagoric satire of mid- century life in Harlem and the American South proved prophetic, the book became a blueprint for inner-city discontent. Invisible Man taught two generations of readers, black and white, how to think about themselves.
If they had read more carefully, it might also have taught them to think for themselves. For this is not a self-help or self-hate book; it is a plea for common survival. It posed Rodney King's plea more subtly but no less potently: Can we all get along?
Most of the time, the dapper Ellison got along with blacks and whites. He was the precocious child of doting parents in Oklahoma City. "I'm raising this boy to be a poet," said Ellison's father, a small businessman who named him after Ralph Waldo Emerson and died when the child was three. Ralph's mother worked as a domestic and recruited blacks for the Socialist Party. There was no shortage of role models for Ralph; he attended a grammar school named for Frederick Douglass and won a scholarship to Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute. While in the Merchant Marines during World War II, he published several short stories. One day, just after the war, he found himself typing, "I am an invisible man." He spent seven years developing that sentence into the work that brought him instant fame.
Shuttling boldly between fable and philosophy, Invisible Man is the story of a Candide of color. Down home, our unnamed hero is given a scholarship by the white gentry, then forced by these same burghers to fight other blacks blindfolded. Up North, he works in a paint factory; its metaphorical function is to whitewash the American experience into the American dream. He is the guinea pig of medical sadists and firebrand communists. He is the wary friend of "Ras the Destroyer," a prototype of black militancy.