![]() ![]() Propelled largely through its characters’ richly defined verbal personae, the novel is perfectly realized by Joe Morton’s masterful, dramatically distinct vocal embodiments the protagonist himself is, not surprising, his tour de force. And so, he has hibernated, invisibly, until now, until a stirring in his soul and imagination suggests the possibilities of his own spring. Racism, our narrator shatteringly learns, is but one form of man’s inhumanity to man. Intrigue upon intrigue later, a more sinister threat reveals itself in his dogmatically ruthless brother-mentor plotting to further his cause even at the expense of others’ lives. Seduced by his prestige among the party’s white sophisticates and a long-craved sense of purposefulness he embraces his work, even standing down Ras, an afro-centric nihilist violently competing for followers. His oratory draws him to the attention of Jack, head of ‘the brotherhood’ (Ellison’s stand-in for the Communist movement), who offers him work and successfully indoctrinates him with utopian propaganda and sets him up to lead the party’s Harlem chapter. Spontaneously addressing the roiling crowd to temper their rage lest it incite the armed white evictors, the injustices he shares with them by race, as well as those befalling him for less obvious reasons, impassion him to eloquently encourage their defiance. Nursed back to health by the kind, maternal Mary up in Harlem, he seems to find his calling at the unlikely event of an elderly couple’s eviction. Expelled and directed north for redemption and employment, he again becomes the fall guy, literally and figuratively, when he is injured and laid off from his job in a union-embattled New York City factory. As a result, the college’s president, a venerated yet utterly Machiavellian figure, scapegoats him. Honored at his Black college to chauffeur a visiting white benefactor, he accedes to the request to take a fateful detour through the town’s Black slums. A high school valedictorian down South, he receives a scholarship from a white group after being brought onstage for a humiliating, bigoted burlesque. And the actor reading to us here seems to have been born for the role as the movie trailers say, Joe Morton is The Invisible Man.įrom his nameless and hidden existence in a Manhattan basement, our narrator leads us through the events leading to his identity or lack of one. A richly poetic and cinematic work carrying a searing social critique, the novel features a first-person narrative that seems written to be heard as much as read. He is The Invisible Man, the protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s masterpiece, electrifying today, and devastatingly so when published in 1953. ![]() An idealistic young man strives to make his way among the like-minded of his own Black community and the larger white world beyond only to experience cascading disillusionment in both. ![]()
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