Alienation and Identity in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

Introduction

Many critics consider Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man a classic of American literature and a treatise on how Black Americans have been treated by white society throughout the decades. His story is a tale of alienation, prejudice, and the strength one man musters to rise above these obstacles and become the best version of himself. This paper offers a brief biography of the author, addresses the theme of alienation as it pertains to the work, and surveys critical reviews of the novel.

Ralph Ellison: A Biographical Overview

Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on March 1, 1914. His parents, Lewis and Ida Ellison, were from the South but had moved to Oklahoma in search of racial equality they could not find at home (Watts 33). His father died when Ellison was three, and his mother raised her two sons in virtual poverty thereafter. Despite growing up poor, Ellison was raised with the conviction that he could accomplish and enjoy the same things as white Americans. His parents encouraged their sons to read, learn, and experiment. He also learned to love many culturally significant Black artistic forms, including the blues, jazz, and spiritual church music (Watts 35).

Ellison learned to play the trumpet and performed in his high school band. His musical talent earned him a scholarship to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1933, where he majored in music and music theory. While living in Alabama, however, he discovered the depth of prejudice and hatred that Black Southerners faced, and he learned to confront that prejudice on his own terms. He once said: "I learned to outmaneuver those who interpreted my silence as submission, my efforts at self-control as my fear, my contempt as awe before superior status, my dreams of faraway places and room at the top of the heap as defeat before the barriers of their stifling, provincial world" (Watts 36–37). Many critics believe it was Ellison's experiences at Tuskegee that would later shape his writing and his thinking about Black America.

In 1936, Ellison was forced to leave Tuskegee because of a dispute over his scholarship funds, and he never returned. He traveled to New York expecting to make his living as a musician, but he encountered prejudice and hardship, and at times had no home and little money. He did manage to meet influential Black writers and musicians, including Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and it was during this period that he first began to consider writing as a profession. His mother died in 1937, and he attended her funeral in Dayton, Ohio, financially destitute and full of self-doubt. It was after her death that he threw himself into learning everything he could about writing and began to earn his living as a writer. Richard Wright helped him secure a position with the Federal Writers' Project in New York, and Ellison was finally able to make a decent living while honing his craft.

Economically stable at last, Ellison developed as a writer. He contributed several essays to the Writers' Project volume The Negro in New York and also worked on a project compiling Black folklore. His exposure to the richness and diversity of urban Black folklore likely inspired his subsequent use of folklore in his fiction (Watts 41).

After 1942, Ellison worked as an editor, wrote essays and commentary, and began focusing on fiction. Invisible Man was first published in 1952 — Ellison's debut work of fiction and ultimately his only published novel. The book was a national bestseller for sixteen weeks after its release in April 1952. It won the 1953 National Book Award for fiction, has been translated into seventeen languages, and has never gone out of print. In 1999, a group of prominent writers and scholars placed Invisible Man in the top twenty most influential works of fiction from the twentieth century (Thomas).

Alienation as the Central Theme

Ellison continued to write throughout his life, earning praise from both white and Black intellectuals. His essays and journal articles addressed alienation and prejudice, but his writing also celebrated the elements that made America great — its music and literature among them. Some scholars considered Ellison an elitist and intellectual snob, while others found his work profoundly moving and relevant to Black experience. Some Black readers felt he had "sold out" and was more an advocate for white elite society than for authentic Black life. Yet Ellison lived in both worlds and seemed to understand each with genuine depth. For many years he taught at New York University as an Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities. Ralph Ellison died in 1994, and Invisible Man remains his greatest literary legacy.

Ellison's Invisible Man is, from start to finish, a treatise on alienation. As one critic observed:

"The entire story centers on an anonymous, young Black man's painful acceptance of his social alienation, which is so extreme that he has virtually no control over the sequence of events that directs the course of his life. He receives so little recognition for his efforts to define a meaningful identity for himself that he assumes a new name, which characterizes his feelings of acute marginality: the Invisible Man" (Ellison and Bloom 82).

As a Black man, Ellison knew firsthand what it meant to be alienated from the rest of society, just as his narrator experiences alienation and prejudice throughout the novel. As the narrator says early in the book, "It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen" (Ellison 3). For Black Americans in the 1950s, when the novel was first published, it was often safer to be unseen and unheard — they were not accepted, and were actively excluded from most of white society. Black Americans endured the indignities of separate restaurants, separate railroad cars, and separate restrooms, and suffered enormous persecution because of their skin color. They were truly alienated from mainstream society, and Invisible Man uses this theme of alienation to illustrate the narrator's invisibility. In practical terms, Black Americans were largely invisible to white Americans — and if they were "unseen," they could not challenge the comfortable fictions that sustained racial prejudice.