Looking Back Having Finished Invisible Man

When Mr. Mitchell first assigned us Invisible Man at the start of the year, like other books we have read and analyzed in English classes at Uni, I hadn’t really heard of it before. The first week, we were assigned to start the book and read the prologue. After reading the prologue, I had a few initial reactions. Firstly, I saw the narrator as a somewhat odd and questionable character whose story seemed … interesting, to say the least. In my mind, over the course of the novel I imagined this character telling the reader about his life and how he got to where he was, or describing some specific period that had an impact on his life. And although I was right to assume this was the general outline of the story, I was completely unprepared for what Ellison had in mind.

The fact that Ellison filled his chapters with so much detail and metaphor was itself unexpected. Like we have discussed in class, each chapter seemed like a story on its own, and I had never really encountered this. I remember thinking to myself “Am I on the right chapter? Did I skip some pages? How did the scene change so fast?” Already my view of the novel was changing, and I had barely read a few chapters. Having finished the book, it makes sense why Ellison needed to describe each scene so quickly, since he wanted to cover the majority narrator’s life in one book. But I have realized that even though he did make each chapter so separated from the last, there was no detail lost and no idea left behind. Ellison managed to keep up with the ideas he was trying to convey while maintaining a steady description of the narrator’s life. We witnessed the development of the narrator’s quest to find his identity and discover his invisibility as well as his progress towards the version of himself we witnessed in the prologue. All of which being ideas that occurred throughout the entirety of the book. Additionally, as we finished the book, I realized how much commentary Ellison was able to include through the narrator’s own realizations. Of course after reading the prologue, I assumed there would be some deeper theme Ellison would portray, but the amount of detail and variety Ellison included in his social commentary was much greater than I had expected.

Looking back to the start of the book, I’m not sure what I pictured Ellison would do with the character of the narrator Invisible Man in terms of his discovery about life. I imagined the narrator having similar experiences to Bigger Thomas –in that the character was constantly finding new ideas to grapple with, specifically identity – or experiences very much in contrast to Bigger, since his character was portrayed as more intelligent and somewhat more logical in his actions. Either way, I have realized that Ellison went beyond the narrator’s own realizations and implied that these ideas were applicable to everyone (not just the narrator or a single individual), even in today’s society.