Ralph Ellison (1914-1994)

• in contrast to his contemporaries such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Ellison's characters are dispassionate, educated and self-aware

Invisible Man

Characters:

• Golden Day (a bar)
• Mr. Norton
• Dr. Bledsoe 
• Mr. Emerson
• Liberty Paints plant
• "Optic White"
• Tod Clifton
• Brother Jack

Summary:

• The narrator begins telling his story with the claim that he is an "invisible man" as a result of the refusal of others to see him. Because of his invisibility, he has been hiding from the world, living underground and stealing electricity from the Monopolated Light & Power Company. He burns 1369 light bulbs simultaneously and listens to Louis Armstrong's "(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue" on a phonograph and says that he has gone underground in order to write the story of his life and invisibility.
• The narrator had lived in the South and as a gifted public speaker had been rewarded by a group of important white men with a scholarship to a prestigious black college. However they also force him to fight in a "battle royal" where he is pitted against other young black men in a boxing ring. They also force them to scramble over an electrified rug to snatch at fake gold coins.
• In college, the narrator is asked to drive a wealthy white trustee, Mr. Norton, around campus. He eventually takes Norton to a bar where Norton passes out and a black war veteran taunts Norton and the narrator for their blindness regarding race relations.
• The narrator is chastised by the college president, Dr. Bledsoe for not showing Norton an idealized version of black life. He expels him and sends him to New York City in search for a job with letters of recommendation addressed to the college's trustees.
• The narrator goes to New York but is unsuccessful despite the letters. At Mr. Emerson's office, a trustee, Mr. Emerson's son informs the narrator that Bledsoe's letters actually portray him as dishonorable and unreliable. He helps the narrator to get a low-paying job at the Liberty Paints plant, whose trademark color is "Optic White."
• The narrator serves as assistant to Lucius Brockway but they end up fighting and one of the tanks explode. The narrator is knocked unconscious and wakes up having temporarily lost his memory and the ability to speak. The doctors use him as an opportunity to conduct electric shock experiments.
• When the narrator regains his memory he leaves the hospital but collapses on the street and he is taken to the home of Mary, a kind woman who nurtures his sense of black heritage.
• One day he witnesses the eviction of an elderly black couple from their Harlem apartment and gives an impassioned speech. Brother Jack overhears him and offers him a position as spokesman for the Brotherhood, a political organization that allegedly works to help the socially oppressed. The narrator has to take a new name, break with his past and move to a new apartment. 
• The narrator is successful and becomes a high-profile figure in the Brotherhood. However a member accuses him of trying to use the Brotherhood to advance a selfish desire for personal distinction and he is moved to a post as an advocate of women's rights. After a speech one evening he is seduced by one of the white women at the gathering who uses him to play out her sexual fantasies about black men. 
• The Brotherhood sends the narrator back to Harlem where he sees Tod Clifton, someone from the Brotherhood whom he knew, selling dancing "Sambo" dolls. He is shot dead by policemen who claim he doesn't have a permit to sell wares on the street and the narrator holds a funeral for Clifton. The Brotherhood is furious for staging the funeral without permission and Brother Jack castigates him. As he is doing so a glass eye falls from one of his sockets. 
• The narrator wants to gain revenge on Jack and the Brotherhood. He decides to undermine the Brotherhood by seeming to go along with them completely and he decides to flatter and seduce a woman close to one of the party leaders in order to obtain secret information about the group.
• The woman he chooses, Sybil, however, knows nothing about the Brotherhood. While with Sybil in his apartment, he receives a call asking him to go to Harlem. 
• The narrator arrives in Harlem which is in the middle of a full-fledged riot. He becomes involved in setting fire to a building and to escape from the policemen, the narrator falls down a manhole. The police draw the cover over the manhole and the narrator says he has stayed underground ever since. 

1. “I’s big and black and I say ‘Yes, suh’ as loudly as any burrhead when it’s convenient, but I’m still the king down here. . . . The only ones I even pretend to please are big white folk, and even those I control more than they control me. . . . That’s my life, telling white folk how to think about the things I know about. . . . It’s a nasty deal and I don’t always like it myself. . . . But I’ve made my place in it and I’ll have every Negro in the country hanging on tree limbs by morning if it means staying where I am.”

2. “Our white is so white you can paint a chunka coal and you’d have to crack it open with a sledge hammer to prove it wasn’t white clear through.”

3. . . . the cast-iron figure of a very black, red-lipped and wide-mouthed Negro . . . stared up at me from the floor, his face an enormous grin, his single large black hand held palm up before his chest. It was a bank, a piece of early Americana, the kind of bank which, if a coin is placed in the hand and a lever pressed upon the back, will raise its arm and flip the coin into the grinning mouth.

4. I looked at Ras on his horse and at their handful of guns and recognized the absurdity of the whole night and of the simple yet confoundingly complex arrangement of hope and desire, fear and hate, that had brought me here still running, and knowing now who I was and where I was and knowing too that I had no longer to run for or from the Jacks and the Emersons and the Bledsoes and Nortons, but only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine. . . . And I knew that it was better to live out one’s own absurdity than to die for that of others, whether for Ras’s or Jack’s.

5. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.