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What do you guys think about Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison? I'm about two thirds of the way through and so far I like it. I read the prologue and I thought it was gonna be Notes from the Underground but the guy is black but it's actually more insightful than that. Right now I guess I'm struggling with how Ellison is portraying the conflict between group identity and individual identity.
The beginning of the novel seems to be pretty condemning of group identity, like how Bledsoe and the white trustee Norton both seem to care more about the narrator fitting into the group identity they have established for blacks as fitting an educated yet subservient role to whites. When the narrator leaves the college though and joins the Brotherhood, it feels like he's still having his individuality rejected and instead filling a generic role for the Brotherhood instead of the white man. Is Ellison proposing this as a solution or is he equally condemning black organizations for not caring about individualism?
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>>8634567
I read the prologue three or four times before somehow managing to lose the book.
Prologue is God-tier. That's all I have to contribute.
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>>8634589
Yeah my teacher says the prologue does a good job of setting up the whole book; I'm gonna go back and reread it once I've finished. The theme set up in the prologue still kinda confuses me though; when the narrator's grandfather says he is a traitor, is it meant to be ironic since he spent all his life serving whites in the white power structure, or is there some potence to his "resistance" that I missed, thus making his statement unironic?
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>>8634600
It's not a book about blacks and whites. He describes a universal human condition
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>>8634706
You haven't read the book.
Ellison certainly values Universalism, but he recognizes that the Black American has to mediate his claim to the universal through his own particular situation since his relation to society is so profoundly shaped by a history of racial subjugation. Consider when this book was written.
It's hard to "transcend" when you can't even drink from the water fountain you'd like to.
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>>8634567
I haven't read it, but it's lauded as the only canon-tier piece of fiction written by a
Anyways i've been watching Luke Cage and they've manage to shoehorn this book into like 5 or 6 shots so far, and i'm only just past halfway through the season - so that must mean something. It might even be indicative of it's merit or influence on the protagonist
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