The narrator of Invisible Man had been thrown out college after his third year and immediately went to New York, where he sought to earn some money with the hope of returning. While we were watching the documentary on Ralph Ellison in class, I couldn't help but think how funny it was that Ralph Ellison himself had left college for New York during his junior year, intending to return once he had made some money, but never did. It really made me wonder if there were any other parallels between his life and the book he had written.
Clearly there are a number of character traits and experiences that they both share, like spending a huge amount of time in New York and enjoying jazz music and improvisation, Ellison to such an extent that he studied it in college. Beyond that, especially during class discussion, I also noticed how he appeared as somewhat of a Bledsoe figure, even though he probably wasn't really. Some critics like Howe saw this, by saying essentially that his work wasn't "black" enough, considering his skin color, and he was trying to appeal only to white people in his novel. As untrue as it may have been, it's easy to imagine, since his work was so well-recieved by white critics and had a tendancy to be denounced by a number of black critics.
Additionally, I saw a couple of major themes in his life relfected in the book. He was described by his peers as being "elitist" after he had finished it, which reminded me a lot of the narrator. By the end of the book, he had ultimately decided that the best course of action, at least for him, was to dissociate himself completely from society in order to discover himself. This sounds a lot like the snobbishness and elitism that Ellison's peers describe him as.
Finally, a somewhat surprising but important piece of information to consider is that Ellison refers to himself as a Negro, despite its increasingly negative connotation. This greatly follows one of the important patterns in the book, where Ellison never truly denounces racism, but rather looks at it very carefully under his magnifying glass. All of these similarities are really interesting to look at and are a good reminder to me of just how closely intertwined an author is with their book.
I agree that Ellison can be seen as a Bledsoe figure, especially after we heard how little his peers valued his company. Ellison couldn't have pulled all of these complex characters out of thin air, especially the narrator, so he has to be using real-life inspiration, including himself. However, after the narrator writes his story down, he sees himself and the world in a new light and decides that it is time to leave his hole. Ellison, on the other hand, as far as we know, didn't have a life-altering change in perspective after writing "Invisible Man" so maybe he isn't like the narrator.
ReplyDeleteI find a particularly Ellisonian irony in the way that the author's life *after* the novel's publication seems weirdly anticipated by the novel itself. The Ellison who *wrote* the book would not have fit the profile of the Bledsoe figure, for example--he's the "college dropout" who sort of stumbled into the literary world after initially wanting to be a composer. But there's a painful irony in the way he was sort of painted in this way by younger writers (who don't always seem so familiar with the book!).
ReplyDeleteI'm with Ellison in saying that there's no particular need for a novel to explicitly "denounce" racism--I can't imagine a reader coming away from _Invisible Man_ thinking that the novel is somehow okay with racism. He depicts a character whose life is shaped in profound ways by racism--he's "kept running" by this absurd society, which Ellison ultimately depicts as a sad and absurd joke. But the novel is perhaps less convinced that Wright's that the object or source of the racism can be identified and attacked through fiction: there's good reason to protest, in Ellison, but he's a lot less sure at whom the protest should be directed.
I've noticed that I have more trouble distinguishing Invisible Man's narrator with its author than with any of the other books we've read, so I think the fact that there are so many parallels would explain that pretty well. Mr. Mitchell makes a really good point about how Ellison depicts racism: yes, the novel doesn't outright say "racism is bad," but by showing us how racism shapes and affects the narrator, Invisible man still makes its point.
ReplyDeleteI think that the similarities between the narrator's and Ellison's life point to the fact that everyone is trying to find their identity, something that the narrator struggles immensely with, and that maybe Ellison was writing the book to try and help him find his own identity. As the narrator writes his own story down to fully process it, maybe Ellison is doing a similar thing, but expanding its themes to fir more people so that it can help more people find who they really are.
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