Reading Circle Community Group
A group for folks in all walks of life in any situation that want to expand their minds or occupy themselves away from a pressing matter and delve into reading good literature. Activities will include but are not limited to discussions on books read, recommendations on what to read, and critical analysis to broaden appreciation for old and new literature.
The time has come. The time is now.
It is time to make good on this read. I said I was coming back to ask questions, didn't I? I never did find my dictator's hat, though. I'm now leaning more toward the idea of a dictator's head band. Maybe one with a little insignia in the middle?
Here are a myriad of questions on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Answer as many as you want, but PLEASE FOR THE SAKE OF THE FREE WORLD ANSWER AT LEAST ONE. It would make me happy. I rarely get to grin. If you answer one, I'll grin.
I will.
I'll chime in with my question / answer pick tomorrow.
~DISCUSSION QUESTIONS~
1. What makes Ellison's narrator invisible? What is the relationship between his invisibility and other people's blindness--both involuntary and willful? Is the protagonist's invisibility due solely to his skin color? Is it only the novel's white characters who refuse to see him?
2. One drawback of invisibility is that "you ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world" [p. 4]. How does the narrator try to prove that he exists? Does this sentence provide a clue to the behavior of other characters in the book?
3. What are the narrator's dreams and goals? How are these variously fulfilled or thwarted in the course of the book?
4. Is the reader meant to identify with the narrator? To sympathize with him? How do you think Ellison himself sees his protagonist?
5. What is the significance of the grandfather's deathbed speech [p.16]? Whom or what has he betrayed? What other characters in this book resort to the same strategy of smiling betrayal?
6. Throughout the novel the narrator gives speeches, or tries to give them, to audiences both black and white, at venues that range from a whites-only "smoker" to the funeral of a black street vendor murdered by the police. What role does oratory--and, more broadly, the spoken word--play in Invisible Man?
7. The "battle royal" sequence portrays black men fighting each other for the entertainment of whites. Does Ellison ever portray similar combats between blacks and whites? To what end?
8. Throughout the book the narrator encounters a number of white benefactors, including a millionaire college trustee, an amiable playboy, and the professional agitator Brother Jack. What does the outcome of these relationships suggest about the possibility of friendship or cooperation between the races?
9. What black men does the protagonist choose as mentors or role models? Do they prove to be any more trustworthy than his white "benefactors"? What about those figures whose authority and advice the narrator rejects--for example, the vet in The Golden Day and the separatist Ras the Exhorter? What characters in Invisible Man, if any, represent sources of moral authority and stability?
10. What cultural tendencies or phenomena does Ellison hold up for satire in this novel? For example, what were the real-life models for the Founder, the Brotherhood, and Ras the Exhorter? How does the author convey the failures and shortcomings of these people and movements?
11. Why might Tod Clifton have left the Brotherhood to peddle demeaning dancing Sambo dolls? What does the narrator mean when he says: "It was as though he [Clifton] had chosen...to fall outside of history"? How would you describe Ellison's vision of history and the role that African-Americans play within it?
12. Invisible Man may be said to exemplify the paranoid style of American literature. How does Ellison establish an atmosphere of paranoia in his novel, as though the reader, along with the narrator, "had waded out into a shallow pool only to have the bottom drop out and the water close over my head" [p.432]? Why is this style particularly appropriate to Ellison's subject matter?
13. Where in Invisible Man does Ellison--who was trained as a musician--use language to musical effect? (For example, compare the description of the college campus on pages 34-7 to Trueblood's confession on 51-68, to the chapel scene on 110-135, and Tod Clifton's funeral on 450-461.) What different sorts of language does Ellison employ in these and other passages? How does the "music" of these sections--their rhythm, assonance, and alliteration--heighten their meaning or play against it?
14. More than forty years after it was first published, Invisible Man is still one of the most widely read and widely taught books in the African-American literary canon. Why do you think this is so? How true is this novel to the lives of black Americans in the 1990s?
15. In spite of its vast success (or perhaps because of it), Ellison's novel--and the author himself--were fiercely criticized in some circles for being insufficiently "Afrocentric." Do you think this is true? Do you think Ellison made artistic compromises in order to make Invisible Man accessible to white readers?
It is time to make good on this read. I said I was coming back to ask questions, didn't I? I never did find my dictator's hat, though. I'm now leaning more toward the idea of a dictator's head band. Maybe one with a little insignia in the middle?
Here are a myriad of questions on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Answer as many as you want, but PLEASE FOR THE SAKE OF THE FREE WORLD ANSWER AT LEAST ONE. It would make me happy. I rarely get to grin. If you answer one, I'll grin.
I will.
I'll chime in with my question / answer pick tomorrow.
~DISCUSSION QUESTIONS~
1. What makes Ellison's narrator invisible? What is the relationship between his invisibility and other people's blindness--both involuntary and willful? Is the protagonist's invisibility due solely to his skin color? Is it only the novel's white characters who refuse to see him?
2. One drawback of invisibility is that "you ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world" [p. 4]. How does the narrator try to prove that he exists? Does this sentence provide a clue to the behavior of other characters in the book?
3. What are the narrator's dreams and goals? How are these variously fulfilled or thwarted in the course of the book?
4. Is the reader meant to identify with the narrator? To sympathize with him? How do you think Ellison himself sees his protagonist?
5. What is the significance of the grandfather's deathbed speech [p.16]? Whom or what has he betrayed? What other characters in this book resort to the same strategy of smiling betrayal?
6. Throughout the novel the narrator gives speeches, or tries to give them, to audiences both black and white, at venues that range from a whites-only "smoker" to the funeral of a black street vendor murdered by the police. What role does oratory--and, more broadly, the spoken word--play in Invisible Man?
7. The "battle royal" sequence portrays black men fighting each other for the entertainment of whites. Does Ellison ever portray similar combats between blacks and whites? To what end?
8. Throughout the book the narrator encounters a number of white benefactors, including a millionaire college trustee, an amiable playboy, and the professional agitator Brother Jack. What does the outcome of these relationships suggest about the possibility of friendship or cooperation between the races?
9. What black men does the protagonist choose as mentors or role models? Do they prove to be any more trustworthy than his white "benefactors"? What about those figures whose authority and advice the narrator rejects--for example, the vet in The Golden Day and the separatist Ras the Exhorter? What characters in Invisible Man, if any, represent sources of moral authority and stability?
10. What cultural tendencies or phenomena does Ellison hold up for satire in this novel? For example, what were the real-life models for the Founder, the Brotherhood, and Ras the Exhorter? How does the author convey the failures and shortcomings of these people and movements?
11. Why might Tod Clifton have left the Brotherhood to peddle demeaning dancing Sambo dolls? What does the narrator mean when he says: "It was as though he [Clifton] had chosen...to fall outside of history"? How would you describe Ellison's vision of history and the role that African-Americans play within it?
12. Invisible Man may be said to exemplify the paranoid style of American literature. How does Ellison establish an atmosphere of paranoia in his novel, as though the reader, along with the narrator, "had waded out into a shallow pool only to have the bottom drop out and the water close over my head" [p.432]? Why is this style particularly appropriate to Ellison's subject matter?
13. Where in Invisible Man does Ellison--who was trained as a musician--use language to musical effect? (For example, compare the description of the college campus on pages 34-7 to Trueblood's confession on 51-68, to the chapel scene on 110-135, and Tod Clifton's funeral on 450-461.) What different sorts of language does Ellison employ in these and other passages? How does the "music" of these sections--their rhythm, assonance, and alliteration--heighten their meaning or play against it?
14. More than forty years after it was first published, Invisible Man is still one of the most widely read and widely taught books in the African-American literary canon. Why do you think this is so? How true is this novel to the lives of black Americans in the 1990s?
15. In spite of its vast success (or perhaps because of it), Ellison's novel--and the author himself--were fiercely criticized in some circles for being insufficiently "Afrocentric." Do you think this is true? Do you think Ellison made artistic compromises in order to make Invisible Man accessible to white readers?
I do not agree with the notion that Ellison, and in turn, Invisible Man, is insufficiently Afrocentric. I believe those who criticized him and the novel for this paltry idea are those that did not have the ability to grasp the novel's message.
Taken into account when he wrote this, (1947) and the fact that he himself is African American, to criticize the book's intentions of being less than Afrocentric borders on idiocy. In the epilogue, there is a specific line or two, that are rapidly becoming my favorites, that to me, sum up what Ellison and his narrator are trying to convey to the reader.
"America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. It's "winner take nothing" that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat...Our fate is to become one, and yet many--This is not prophecy, but description. Thus one of the greatest jokes in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker everyday, and the blacks striving toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray. None of us seems to know who he is and where he's going." (pg 577).
While Ellison portrayed the plight of the black community viscerally and with stark realism and at times cause me to feel shame in the history of our country and it's treatment of those that are not white, this passage at the end gives quite a nod to the notion that, in layman's terms, we need to NOT be ethnocentric in any manner and accept the world for what it has become and what it has the potential to become.
The idea that one race must conquer the other has been prevalent since, if you will allow me to be trite with cliche', 'the beginning of time'.
Again, allowing for the time when it was written to come into play, America was still in the trenches of 'colored' bathrooms, fountains, diners and colleges, while whites had their own 'superior' facilities. This was before Martin Luther King, before Malcom X, and still within the constraints of a recent shackle to slavery.
To accuse Ellison of not being or writing 'black' enough is basically taking the entire novel and throwing it back in his face and throwing hands up without the ability to actually understand. While trying to shed light on the atrocities that blacks were dealing with on a day to day basis, Ellison is making the point that we should all be a bit invisible. The need to shed the light off the color of our skin and focus on the humanity that bubbles within is a fine point to write, especially with America's wound of slavery still so raw at the time.
What makes it timeless and a masterpiece is the fact that me, a white girl from the depths of California can pick up the novel almost 65 years from when it was written and feel same indignation, and raw emotion that was probably so much more painful then, in the words that Ellison penned.