Invisible man

Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF

Back Cover:

Winner of the National Book Award for fiction. . . Acclaimed by a 1965 Book Week poll of 200 prominent authors, critics, and editors as "the most distinguished single work published in the last twenty years."

            Unlike any novel you've ever read, this is a richly comic, deeply tragic, and profoundly soul-searching story of one young Negro's baffling experiences on the road to self-discovery.

            From the bizarre encounter with the white trustee that results in his expulsion from a Southern college, to its powerful culmination in New York's Harlem, his story moves with a relentless drive: -- the nightmarish job in a paint factory -- the bitter disillusionment with the "Brotherhood" and its policy of betrayal -- the violent climax when screaming tensions are released in a terrifying race riot.

            This brilliant, monumental novel is a triumph of story-telling. It reveals profound insight into every man's struggle to find his true self.

"Tough, brutal, sensational. . . it blazes with authentic talent." -- New York Times

"A work of extraordinary intensity -- powerfully imagined and written with a savage, wryly humorous gusto." -- The Atlantic Monthly

"A stunning block-buster of a book that will floor and flabbergast some people, bedevil and intrigue others, and keep everybody reading right through to its explosive end." -- Langston Hughes

"Ellison writes at a white heat, but a heat which he manipulates like a veteran." -- Chicago Sun-Times

TO IDA

Copyright, 1947, 1948, 1952, by Ralph Ellison

All rights reserved under International

and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

For information address Random House, Inc.,

457 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022.

This is an authorized reprint of a hardcover edition

published by Random House, Inc.

Thirteenth Printing

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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

"You are saved," cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; "you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?"

            Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

HARRY: I tell you, it is not me you are looking at,

Not me you are grinning at, not me your confidential looks

Incriminate, but that other person, if person,

You thought I was: let your necrophily

Feed upon that carcase. . .

            T. S. Eliot, Family Reunion

 

 

 

 

Prologue

            I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.

            Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a bio-chemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. Then too, you're constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful.