The Role Of Invisibility In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

Out of all the generalizations made in Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature like a Professor, the generalization “It’s Always Political” seems to be especially relevant to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The phrase “It’s Always Political” does not necessarily mean that a work focuses on a particular issue within the government of a region, but it indicates that the story is meant to reveal a fault, or several faults within society. In Invisible Man, Ellison uses the life experiences of the protagonist to highlight the lack of social progress in the United States during the 1930s. The invisibility of African Americans in the United States serves as the central theme in this work. In fact, the invisibility of the narrator draws even more attention to the mistreatment of African Americans in society prior to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Before being completely
During the novel, Ellison makes reference to these racial tensions by setting the story in Harlem, during the Race Riot of 1935. As a member of the brotherhood, the narrator had the responsibility of reporting what was going on in Harlem during the period of ethnic hostilities. The narrator believed that he “was to keep ever before them a picture of a bright, passive, good humored, receptive mass ever willing to accept their every scheme” (Ellison 514). By including the Harlem Race Riot in the novel, Ellison is able to show that despite being a country built on principles of freedom, and slavery having been abolished a little under a century ago, there was an ongoing battle between white supremacist and African American minorities. The magnitude of violence that took place during the Harlem Race Riots reveals that the United States was not only going through a financial crisis, but a social one as