Racial Awareness In Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man

Intellectual, engaging, multilayered, and thought provoking are all descriptions of Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, not to mention influential. So much so that even the writings of Barack Obama are molded after Ellison's only novel published during his lifetime. The book follows an unnamed man with a talent for public speaking through his endeavors and life experiences, starting off with him recalling his tale and claiming to be invisible. Not physically transparent but rather that people never see him, only themselves and their surroundings, he then describes his living conditions in the basement of a large building in New York with 1,369 lights illuminating his living space.

Then he begins to recollect and tell his story, starting with the first speech he ever gave to a large audience. Before he gets the chance to speak he is told he must take part in a battle royale in which he and many other black men are blindfolded an tossed into a ring then told to fight brutally. Once the battle ends they are then forced to cross an electric rug to pick up the money that was promised to them, he is then allowed to give his speech with a mouth full of blood and body sore with bruises.

The speech lands him a spot at a university and he is then responsible to drive around a man named Mr.Norton, Norton orders the narrator to drive to the most run
The book contains a metric ton of symbolism, a cast and a half of complex characters, changing writing styles that set the motion of the story, and filled with conflict the narrator must resolve. Our unnamed man faces multiple hardships in order to figure out his true identity and break the molds, barriers, and generalizations of his race. All in all we can’t take Emerson’s words at face value as he often never means what the words depict but an entire other subtext, if we did the book would be a superhero