Invisible Man

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is our next (and final) book before the Ap Exam. I have gotten to the end of chapter one and up to now, it’s pretty good. The writer uses an informal register and the tone is nonchalant up to now. The narrator is in first person and from what I have understood, is an African American living in the South in a place called Greenwood when he was “visible” and when he became invisible, relocated to New York.

The narrator’s diction is highlights that he is smart. When he gives the speech in front of the white men he is described as knowing “more big words than a pocket sized dictionary”, and he holds true to this by using words like extol and social responsibility. Maybe the words are not that “big” for the reader but to the rest of the characters he delivers his speech to, it is.

The syntax varies between the characters. The invisible man narrates clearly and when giving his speech, the order of the words is normal. The rest of the characters are also written out in this way but their diction is more vulgar because of the use of bad words and derogatory terms. The narrator must be have been given this diction to put him in a higher pedestal than the rest. Maybe showing his mental superiority and a distinction between what the author implies as good or bad.

The author used personification in the prologue when talking about death after beating up the man that insulted the invisible man: “Would Death himself have freed him for wakeful living?”(pg 5) This adds to the idea that to be awakened from such a nightmare of fighting something he couldn’t see, death, which is the ultimate slumber, would have been the one to awaken him. This kind of makes me question if the character will keep on bringing death because the personification stood out.

I think it is safe to assume that a theme in this novel will be racism. When the character brought up social equality and social responsibility in his speech, the other characters (who are white) reacted badly. As well during the whole first chapter the derogatory term “nigger” was used multiple times. It seems that this poses a challenge for the main character but he seems to have a lot of pull to keep pushing forward. Yet, having read the prologue, the reader questions what happened to the young man who was so bent on giving his speech but then turns into a man who is invisible and lives in a hole.