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Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in 1913, in Oklahoma City and was named after American transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson because his father wanted him to be a poet. However, after his father died from an accident-induced medical complication when he was barely three years old, his family lived in relative poverty.
After graduating from high school in 1931, Ellison worked to help support his family and save for a down payment on a trumpet, the musical vehicle that helped him gain admission to the prestigious all-black university, Tuskegee Institute, in 1933. He left the Jim Crow South for New York City to earn money for his final year of college in 1936 but never returned to Tuskegee to earn his diploma.
Upon entering the literary scene of New York City, especially Harlem, he met Langston Hughes and Richard Writing, the author of Native Son. Under their mentorship, Ellison began producing short stories and literary criticism and become involved with the Community Party USA, from which he later grew increasingly disillusioned.
Ellison started working on what would become Invisible Man in 1945 and published it in 1952. The novel was enthusiastically received and earned the 1953 National Book Award for fiction. The protagonist of Invisible Man embarks on a metaphorical journey from the Jim Crow South, through the Great Migration to the North, and the disillusionment with persistent racism—mirroring the broader narrative of African American history of the twentieth century.
The Dilemma of the African American Bildungsroman
Is Invisible Man a true bildungsroman?
Does the narrator ultimately find his place and sense of self in the world?
Consider the message of this well-know poem.
We Wear the Mask (Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1895)
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
Prologue: pp. 3-14
What does the narrator mean by “I am invisible . . . simply because people refuse to see me” (p. 3)?
Setting: an underground cellar in New York City around 1952
Chapter 1: pp. 15-33 (aka “Battle Royal”)
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Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Exposition Speech (1895) |