In Ralph Ellison’s 1947 novel, The Invisible Man, the nameless narrator experiences life as a struggling African American living in the South. After obtaining a scholarship to a black college, he is expelled, goes to Harlem, and become part of a political group called The Brotherhood. However, by the end of the novel, he feels no need to be with him because they are traitors, so he stays in a sewer. In the novel’s epilogue, we learn that the narrator contemplates about his life while in the sewer and has dreams with various people who have hurt him in his life. Therefore, he reaches conclusions such as not assigning himself a rank in society, and he believes that even before he has finished something, he has failed it.
Due to the narrator’s experiences in the novel, one can understands why such conclusions have been drawn to. For social reasons, it is because the narrator has always been uncared for; boxing blindly, bringing a white man to a forbidden black community, failing at his paint job, and discovering that the Brotherhood is working against themselves. The narrator begins to feel that everything he touches turns into ash, yet he believed that his rank was going up. He believed that by being part of the Brotherhood, he was of a higher position than when he was boxing in the South. However he was still viewed the same way and became a tool for the political party. Since he failed at all of his professions mentioned above, the narrator now believes that he fails at everything, even if he has not done it yet.
These feelings are completely justified by what the narrator has seen throughout his life. In the South, he is humiliated, blindfolded, and forced to blindly box around nine other black men. While in the Brotherhood, he is only used as a speaker to bring people into the party, and he notices that the entire idea is just a show for those willing to watch. His rank in society will be decided by someone else, regardless of what the narrator doe, thus leading to his invisibility.
Anthony, I really liked that one sentence you used, “The narrator begins to feel that everything he touches turns into ash, yet he believed that his rank was going up.” It shows not only the conflict that he faces in his mind but in society as well. He fails at something, such as the boxing tournament and saying his speech, yet he got “rewarded” with a scholarship to an all-black college. He got kicked out of college, yet he was given seven letters of recommendations to get a job. In the end all of these were false hope given to IM, making him believe that he was “going up in rank.”
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