American writer Ralph Ellison (1913 – 1994) is best known for his novel Invisible Man (1952), which comments on the struggle to construct African American identity in an inherently racist society.
Born in 1913 in Oklahoma City, Ellison grew up during a time of segregation and racial inequality. His family relocated to Indiana in 1921, where he worked different jobs alongside attending high school in order to support his family. After graduating in 1931, Ellison attended the prestigious all-black university, the Tuskegee Institute. However, he found the institution elitist and begged his mother to send him money to maintain the appearance of having a well-to-do family.[1]
During his time at the Tuskegee Institute, Ellison developed a passion for literature, particularly modern classics such as T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.[2] Ellison left Tuskegee in 1936 before finishing his degree and moved to New York City later that same year. He stayed at a YMCA in Harlem where he met Langston Hughes, one of the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance, who introduced Ellison to key figures of the black literary establishment, inclined towards communism. The communist author Richard Wright encouraged Ellison to write his first fiction.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Ellison had many works such as book reviews, short stories, and articles published in leftist magazines, including New Masses. However, Ellison split from the Communist Party during World War Two. While some scholars cite political disillusionment due to allegations that the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) had betrayed African Americans, Brian Dolinar suggests that another factor for Ellison’s moving away from the CPUSA on achieving fame was his reduced need for the support of the black cultural network it had provided.[3] According to Dolinar, Ellison later became part of a network of African American radicals, including Richard Wright and C.L.R. James, who were challenging the political left for their treatment of the issue of racial inequality.[4] His estrangement from the Communist Party can be seen in his Invisible Man. The novel was published in 1952 and won the National Book Award the following year, remaining on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks.
Despite being eligible for the draft, Ellison did not fight during World War Two, but towards the end of the war he enlisted in the US Merchant Marine. Following the war, he published Shadow and Act, a collection of critical socio-political essays and began teaching at universities including Yale. He died in 1994 at the age of 81.
Justine McConnell explains that Ellison’s Invisible Man:
“positions itself at the centre of a triangle formed by ancient classical literature, the canon of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature […] and African American folklore.”[5]
In this we see an overlap between the novel’s socio-political commentary on Ellison’s disillusionment with the Communist Party and struggle against racial inequality, and the ancient world, specifically through the novel’s engagement with the Odyssey.
Invisible Man follows an unnamed African American man in his search for identity and place in society. In his search, the protagonist repeatedly witnesses systemic racism and falls victim to manipulation and exploitation by the “Brotherhood”, an allusion to the Communist Party. The novel is left open-ended: we see the “invisible” protagonist living in an underground room, a “hole” in the city, contemplating whether or not to return to society.
The novel’s similarities with the Odyssey manifest themselves most clearly in the journey to achieve nostos (‘homecoming’) – for Odysseus, this is a literal homecoming journey, but for the protagonist of Invisible Man, it is a search for identity and a sense of belonging. The progress of the respective journeys is similar, with both struggling with obstacles and at one point undergoing a katabasis (descent to the Underworld), although for the Invisible Man, this is again less literal.
In his essay, ‘Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke’ (1966), Ellison rebuts Stanley Edgar Hyman’s rendering of the narrator’s grandfather in Invisible Man as a minstrel; ‘So intense is Hyman’s search for archetypal forms that he doesn’t see that the narrator’s grandfather in Invisible Man is no more involved in a “darky” act than was Ulysses in Polyphemus’ cave.’[6] Here Ellison points to the cunning intelligence of Odysseus also being reflected in the grandfather character. For Ellison, the precedent set by the Homeric hero provided ammunition to oppose Hyman’s view; just as Odysseus’ trickery is only one dimension of his character, so too does the grandfather have more to offer. As Patrice D. Rankine summarises, ‘the figure of Ulysses, to Ellison’s mind, complicated a reductive archetype, that of minstrelsy, that rendered his character subhuman.’[7]
This profile was written by Maeve Neaven.
[1] Als, Hilton, ‘In the Territory: A Look at the Life of Ralph Ellison.’ The New Yorker, May 2007. < https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/05/07/in-the-territory>
[2] Chester, Alfred, & Howard, Vilma (interviewers), ‘The Art of Fiction.’ The Paris Review 8, 1955. < https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5053/the-art-of-fiction-no-8-ralph-ellison>
[3] Dolinar, Brian. The Black Cultural Front: Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. p. 15.
[4] Ibid., p. 152.
[5] McConnell, Justine, ‘Invisible Odysseus and the Cyclops: Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”,’ in Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora since 1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. p. 76.
[6] Ellison, Ralph, ‘Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,’ in Shadow and Act. New York: Signet, 1966. p. 70.
[7] Rankine, Patrice D., ‘Ralph Ellison’s Black American Ulysses,’ in Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. p. 130.
