In Progress Blog Post 1: This Book is Kind of Cool...

I may be only three chapters into Ralph Ellison’s novel “the Invisible Man,” but it is already having a powerful emotional effect on me. It did not start out this way. To be quite honest, the prologue mostly confused me. I was unsure how to take the narrator’s statements. Is he actually invisible? Does he actually live in a hole in the ground, with 1,369 lights? My confusion was further compounded by the narrators odd reefer dream. It seemed, like most literary dreams, to be representative of something, but through the haze of the both the odd writing style and my mom’s old copy of the book from when she was in college, I could not make head or tail of it. Nonetheless, the story settled down in my mind in the first chapter. Here was a recognizable narrative. I followed the story of the narrator’s speech and battle royale with revulsion, but also page-turning eagerness. It was engrossing, and grossing at the same time.. Although I am accustomed to looking back at the conduct of whites in America with dread and disgust, this was especially emotionally moving. The subversiveness and racism of the whites is evident to the reader, yet the narrator seems to believe that he is getting ahead in the world. I had the urge to scream at the narrator for not recognizing the prejudice around him. I can already see Ellison critiquing the Booker T Washington ideal for racial progress. For his humility and subservience the narrator receives ridicule from the white community that he tries to, for lack of a better term, suck up to. In chapters 2 and 3 the hazy storytelling was more evident again, but again there was a compelling narrative keeping me at rapt attention. When the sharecropper Trueblood Jim tells his story of having sex with his daughter I was genuinely fascinated. It was told almost eloquently by this poor, uneducated man. I also saw the critique by Ellison in the narrator’s, and the school’s attitude towards Jim compared to the whites. The black community shuns the poor blacks, seeing them as an embarrassment, instead of trying to move their entire race forward. Here there was a dream as well that played a key part in the story, and I still do not understand it. I should be clear here - I will come back to these things troubling me that I still do not understand. However, I am a person who prefers to keep reading, mostly because I love a good story, but also because it helps me to gather more facts. When I am further along in the book and have a better grasp of the world in which the narrator lives I will return.