Invisible Man Summary: Ralph Ellison's Novel Explained
Invisible Man is Ralph Ellison's first novel. It was published in 1952, and it is the only novel he published in his lifetime. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in 1953, which made Ellison the first African-American writer to win that award. This guide covers the setup, the main characters and the big ideas. A fuller plot summary sits under its own heading near the end, so you can stop before it.
What Invisible Man is about
The narrator is a Black man who is never named. He tells his story from an underground room wired with hundreds of electric lights. He runs them on power stolen from the city's electric grid. From there he reflects on the many ways he has been socially invisible, and then he goes back to his teenage years to explain how he got there.
The story moves from a small town in the American South to Harlem in New York, in the 1930s. As a young man the narrator wins a scholarship to an all-black college. To get it, he has to take part in a brutal, humiliating battle royal staged to entertain the town's rich white dignitaries. That scene sets the pattern for much of the book. Again and again, he does what powerful people expect of him, and again and again it goes wrong.
Along the way the novel takes on many of the social and intellectual questions faced by African Americans in the early 20th century. These include Black nationalism, the relationship between Black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington. Running beneath all of it is a more personal question. Who is this man, once you take away the roles other people hand him?
The main characters
The narrator. Unnamed, ambitious and eager to please at first. He is a gifted speaker, and that gift keeps pulling him into other people's plans.
Mr Norton. A rich white trustee of the college. The narrator drives him around during a visit, and the trip goes badly wrong.
Dr Bledsoe. The president of the college. He is furious that the narrator showed Mr Norton the side of Black life beyond the campus.
Jim Trueblood. A man living near the old slave quarters outside the campus, at the centre of a local scandal. His story horrifies Mr Norton.
Lucius Brockway. The paranoid chief attendant of a factory boiler room in New York, convinced the narrator wants his job.
Mary Rambo. A kindly, old-fashioned woman in Harlem who takes the narrator in. She reminds him of his relatives in the South.
Brother Jack. Leader of a group called the Brotherhood, which says it is committed to improving conditions in Harlem and the wider world.
Ras the Exhorter. A fanatical Black nationalist who believes the Brotherhood is controlled by white people.
Tod Clifton. A youth leader within the Brotherhood.
The themes
Identity. The narrator has no name, and that is the point. He is defined by others at every stage: by the town's dignitaries, by the college, by employers and by the Brotherhood. Critics Malcolm Bradbury and Richard Ruland have described the book's vision as Black existentialist, with a "Kafka-like absurdity".
Power. Almost every institution in the book has someone at the top deciding what the narrator is for. Even groups that claim to speak for him turn out to have their own aims.
Freedom. The narrator keeps moving, from the South to New York and from job to job, hoping to find a place where he can act for himself. The underground room, lit by stolen power, is where his search has left him when the book begins.
Justice. Evictions, police violence and a factory that prides itself on pure white paint all appear in the story. The novel asks who is actually served by the systems that promise fairness.
Why it still matters
The book's standing is unusually high. In 1998 the Modern Library ranked it 19th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Time magazine included it in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. It called the book "the quintessential American picaresque of the 20th century". According to The New York Times, Barack Obama modelled his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father on Ellison's novel.
It suits readers who like big, ambitious literary fiction with a strong voice and a lot of ideas. It is also a good fit for anyone interested in American history, race and politics, or in stories about a young person trying to work out who they are.
Full plot summary (spoilers)
While driving Mr Norton, the narrator stops at Jim Trueblood's cabin. Shaken, Norton asks for a drink. The narrator takes him to a bar full of prostitutes and patients from a nearby mental hospital, where Norton is injured in the chaos. Bledsoe expels the narrator but gives him sealed letters of recommendation for jobs in New York. They fail. The son of one recipient shows him a letter, which reveals Bledsoe never meant to readmit him.
At the Liberty Paint factory, Brockway attacks him and tricks him into causing a boiler explosion. In hospital he is given shock treatment. Afterwards Mary Rambo takes him in. His speech at an eviction stirs a crowd to attack the officials, and Brother Jack recruits him to the Brotherhood as a speaker.
He is later accused of putting his own ambitions first and is moved elsewhere. Back in Harlem, he finds that the Brotherhood has turned its attention to national and international issues. Clifton has left the group and is selling dancing Sambo dolls on the street. A policeman shoots him dead. The narrator's speech at Clifton's funeral rallies the crowd, but the Brotherhood's leaders criticise him for it. He decides the group has no real interest in the Black community's problems.
Trailed by Ras's men, he buys a hat and sunglasses as a disguise. He is then repeatedly mistaken for a man named Rinehart. Our research does not cover the final chapters, so this summary ends here.
