Read this during a rainy spring week in my freezing walled-up patio room on Edgehill Road in Kingston, ON (the steep slope of it calling for such an artful architectural dodge on the part of my college digs' landlord) in 1973. I was cruising for another overdue psychiatric bruising with the stress of my courseload.Henry Kissinger's overkill up the Mekong didn't help either.Anyway, Invisible Man was the last of my required reading for my Modern Novel course towards my degree. As if I didn't need ...

welcome to...INVISIBLE MAY.i've done it again. another impeccable pun combining the title of a seminal work with the month it currently is. another paragon of literature added to my currently reading. another several-week period that shall be spent reading it, one chapter at a time, daily.it's another PROJECT LONG CLASSIC installment.if saying you want to read long classics counts as reading them, i'm the smartest girl in the world. and now i'm reading them, also.let's get started.PROLOGUElove t...

Invisible Man is unique. I went in without really having any expectations other than knowing that it was a classic novel addressing the trials and tribulations faced by the black community in the mid-1900s. While it is that, the experience of the tragic hero of the novel is very bizarre, trippy, and somewhat unexpected. It is told in a way to make sure it reflects on a variety of possible experiences a black man might face during the time period. But, because Ellison is covering so many in one b...

Read in 2018“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.” Part a madman's rambling stream of consciousness, part a touching story of a confused young black man struggling with racial identity, In...

Invisible Man is an extremely well written and intelligent novel full of passion, fire and energy: it’s such a force to be reckoned with in the literary world, and not one to be taken lightly. “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 imaginatio...

Most capital-G Great books can be a grim trudge, like doing homework. Invisible Man is one of the few Great books that's also relentlessly, unapologetically entertaining, full of brawls, explosions, double-crosses, and the exuberant mad. As a meditation on race, it's as fresh as if it had been first published yesterday. One of the most essential American novels ever written and only the best of the best can stand alongside it: Grapes of Wrath, Huckleberry Finn, To Kill A Mockingbird, True Grit.

“When I discover who I am, I’ll be free.” Reading "Invisible Man" during a visit to New York was a deeply touching experience. What an incredible bonus to be able to follow in the footsteps of the young man struggling with racial and political identity questions. The physical presence of New York life enhanced the reading, and the city added flavour and sound to the story. Hearing the noise, walking in the lights of the advertisements, seeing the faces from all corners of the world made the main...

"If social protest is antithetical to art," Ellison stated in an interview with The Paris Review, "what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?" I found the interview stimulating, especially since Ellison's narrator's voice seemed to reach across the pages of this book and coalesce with the myriad of current events. "Perhaps, though, this thing cuts both ways," Ellison continued in the interview, "the Negro novelist draws his blackness too tightly around him when he sits down to write—th...

“I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fibre and liquids- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible because people refuse to see me…When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination- indeed, everything and anything except me.” When I first read the book last year, the above quote really stood out to me. It seemed very Dostevskyan. It has taken a second reading for me to truly process the content of this book, and still I can...

Full disclosure: I wrote my master's thesis on Ellison's novel because I thought the first time that I read it that it is one of the most significant pieces of literature from the 20th century. Now that I teach it in my AP English class, I've reread it many times, and I'm more convinced than ever that if you are only going to read one book in your life, it should be this one. The unnamed protagonist re-enacts the diaspora of African-Americans from the South to the North--and the surreal experien...