I really enjoyed reading Invisible Man, it was thought provoking, but also had some sense of plot and action. The ending, however, did not live up to my expectations. Perhaps the prologue set my expectations too high. Maybe I was too enticed by learning how the narrator set up 1369 light bulbs to realize that this book isn't a work of science fiction and that this setup wouldn't be explained. What ever the cause was, I do not think that Ellison could logically position the prologue at the end of Invisible Man and maintain coherency.
The first problem of the connection is about the narrator's self image. The narrator seems happy of his invisibility in the prologue. It appears that he is in complete control of it and can use it to his advantage. However, in the end of the book, the narrator seems to just have realized his invisibility and is not to sure of it. He definitely doesn't know if it's a good thing. All that he can do with it is to impersonate very different people, while hardly altering his physical appearance (as if he is invisible). I think that in order for the prologue to match up with the conclusion, Ellison should include an event where the narrator is consciously using his invisibility to accomplish a goal (his last work with the Brotherhood doesn't count, he accomplished something with his invisibility, but it was not what he intended).
Another problem with the connection is about the narrator's personality. In the prologue, he wants to have five phonographs to surround himself with music. Where is this love of music in the main text of the novel? The only time I remember music being mentioned is at the party in the Chthonian when Brother Jack get enraged at a man for requesting the narrator to sing spirituals. For me, the biggest issue in this category is disconnect with the power company issue. Not once during the novel does the narrator complain about the power company's exorbitant rates. I don't even recollect the narrator talking about money after he pays Mary back. I just assumed that the Brotherhood took care of everything financial, yet here he is, complaining that he was swindled out of lots of money.
I have to admit I went into this novel with my own preconceived notion of what "invisibility" meant to Ellison. I'm ashamed of how presumptuous I was to think I could predict where Ellison was going with the concept of invisibility. If "invisibility" had meant to Ellison what I presumed he meant in the prologue, the novel should have ended when the narrator has that "epiphany" about the freedom in Rinehart -- we'd all laugh bitterly about the freedom the narrator achieves and that would be the end of it. But I didn't expect Sybil, the looting, the confrontation with Ras, the dream -- the idea that the freedom of the self still cannot be achieved in Rinehart because he is still mimicking alternate forms of reality and not thinking about his own. This is what makes him go into hibernation and attempt to explain it as yet another part of his attempt to make sense of reality. It makes sense to me that the narrator at the end of the novel doesn't match up with the one in the prologue because he changes through the act of writing the novel. For me, the ending was ultimately satisfying because it rightly challenged my oversimplification of invisibility and self discovery.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Alice. I also had the same initial concept of what I thought Ellison meant by "invisibility", and was totally (and pleasantly) surprised when the idea of invisibility was challenged and became more complex.
ReplyDeleteThis is also the kind of novel where the specifics and logistics don't really matter. Things happen because they symbolize things--not because they would actually happen, but because they might as well have happened. This is the reason for the surreality of a lot of the scenes--Ellison is very self-consciously dropping symbols without much care for the believability (which I absolutely love).
It's interesting that Ellison was so into music, and music (folk, blues, spirituals) do figure throughout the background of _Invisible Man_--but we don't see the narrator wanting to be a composer in college, like Ellison, and he's not a musician, like Ellison. He doesn't even seem to listen to music--he distances himself from the zoot-suiters and jazz culture. It's as if he can only indulge his desire for music once he's underground, when he can listen to Louis Armstrong and contemplate it all. This sort of fits with Ellison's general aesthetic, where art is separate in many ways from the political struggles on the streets.
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