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Invisible Man Lecture: The Poetry of Invisibility (Chapters 1-9) (Patreon)

Published:
2023-09-21 20:00:11
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

'I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me...'

Today we're discussing the beginning of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. We're talking about illumination, hibernation, dreams, recognition, searching for the self, social equality, cultural myths, shattered innocence, journeys, and much more.

Video Timestamps:

  • 0:00 the experience of reading Ellison
  • 1:00 locating ourselves in another
  • 3:00 the birth of Invisible Man
  • 6:00 on invisibility & blindness
  • 8:00 sustaining the will to persevere
  • 10:00 who was Ellison writing for?
  • 13:00 novel as social & human protest
  • 15:00 the prologue of Invisible Man
  • 16:00 hibernation & illumination
  • 19:00 poetry out of being invisible
  • 21:00 the power of Louis Armstrong
  • 23:00 the narrator’s dream vision
  • 25:00 dream symbolism & literature
  • 27:00 hibernation prefaces action
  • 28:00 recognising the invisible man
  • 29:00 the search for our true self
  • 30:00 symbolism of the battle royal
  • 32:00 social equality vs responsibility
  • 34:00 appreciation Ellison’s poetic prose
  • 36:00 the narrator drives Mr Norton
  • 37:00 dismantling of cultural myths
  • 40:00 ‘you are bound to a great dream’
  • 43:00 ‘neither of you can see the other’
  • 49:00 the power of reading Ellison aloud
  • 53:00 novel as combination of art forms
  • 53:00 the sermon of Reverend Barbee
  • 58:00 narrator’s meeting with Dr Bledsoe
  • 1:02:00 ‘You don’t exist. Can’t you see that?’
  • 1:06:00 the narrator journeys to the north
  • 1:07:00 ‘prisoners carrying their leg irons’
  • 1:08:00 painful shattering of naivety
  • 1:12:00 from innocence to maturity
  • 1:14:00 your thoughts on Ellison’s novel?

Resources:

  • Jazz Appreciation: One of the most exhilarating deep dives into the history of jazz comes in the form of Ken Burns Jazz, a series that is a documentary filmmaking at its finest. You can immerse yourself in it here.
  • Author's Record Collection: Ralph Ellison's large record collection is on display at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. There's a fascinating discussion about it here. It's also worth following the breadcrumbs left in his essays on jazz in the book Living with Music.
  • Biblical Pairing: As Ralph Ellison evokes the Book of Jonah, you might find it rewarding to revisit this short biblical story and think about the reason for the parallels. For a bonus, appreciate the Melvillean strain in Ellison by watching Orson Welles' performance as Father Mapple delivering the sermon from Moby Dick.
  • Complementary Non-Fiction: James Baldwin's essays in Notes of a Native Son, published the same decade as Invisible Man, make for a incredibly compelling and thought-provoking complement to one's reading of Ellison.
  • I Have A Dream: A decade after the publication of Ellison's novel, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered one of the most iconic speeches in history. You can appreciate it here. You might find it through-provoking to pair the speech with Langston Hughes' poem 'Harlem,' in which he asks, 'What happens to a dream deferred?'
  • Stage Adaptation: You can see the prologue of Invisible Man as adapted in a truly inspired way for the theatre here. One hopes that we can see a great film adaptation of this incredible novel in our lifetimes.
  • How to Read Ellison: If you would like to revisit our introductory lecture for Invisible Man, you can check it out here.

Reading Assignment:

Our next discussion will cover up to and including chapter seventeen, which takes us up to page 342 in the Penguin Modern Classics edition.

Questions for You:

1) Can you relate to the narrator's search for identity?

2) Are you a fan of Ralph Ellison's prose style?

3) What do you think makes Invisible Man great literature?

Happy reading, everybody!

Files

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Comments

Rebekah Sunday

This book was clearly channeled from some divine source. It’s just awe-inspiring. And lyrically beautiful on par with Walt Whitman. I’m obsessed.

Anonymous

OK. This is going to sound weird and please forgive me. I am new here. I read a book in 2020 called We Cast a Shadow by Maurice Carlos Ruffin. It was interesting, kind of surreal. Science fiction. But a character was named Supercargo, a name we see in Chapter 3. Maybe I should reread that book.

nicole gravel

Hello! I am behind in my reading of IMan, only at chapter 4. I read all your commentaries and would love to react to many but first I would like to comment on chapter 1 , the one you call battle royal. It hit me hard, is the least I can say. The horror of all those men drinking and smoking ( it made me think of a painting by Otto Dix ) Their eyes and hands on the body of this nude women,and the reaction of the negro boys, terror,shame, tears; the way they throw the woman up (like Dpn Quichotte), all that was my first horror and my first pain; but then it got worse: the chidren treated like animals( worse than savages, I think, Elizabeth!) that was the second source of horror, of pain; and the third was to realize the alienation of these children: they don't rebelthey don't pack up thir things and go, no, they stay, they comply; they are slaves through and through. The Invisible Man, as a boy,( and all the other boys) wants to please these"men' (I'm not sure theare human) He wants to deliver his speech and make his mother proud. And a final source of pan: my own alienation, my own blindness to all the evil in the world. It took me a few days to recoverIt seemed to be the climax of the book. Ellison could go no further. Buy in chapter 3, he does go further.Like Dr. Norton,I think I need "a little something to go on!

amber dawn. pullin

I love the way you spoke of dreams and dreaming. That is something that I have thought about a lot over the years. The way one reveals knowledge to themselves through our own interpretation and understanding of our dreams.

Susan Graham

I can’t read this without putting it in conversation with two other important American novels: Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Wright and Elison knew each other and if memory serves they didn’t see eye to eye on things. Elison was the younger generation. But Invisible Man (IM) reminds me a lot of Bigger, except IM is more sophisticated and his internal mind is rendered so beautifully. Mr Norton reminds me of Mr. Dalton from NS–and both Bigger and IM both become chauffeurs for a time, driving white men around, white men who are supposed to “help” them rise in white culture, but both end up undermining them. Both men are purposefully blind to the reality of the Black experience. It’s the racism of the white progressive on full display in both books, but a generation apart. And there are so many parallels with Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) that Kesey must have read Elison. They are stylistically similar in that CN is like a big ole dreamy acid trip. Both Big Chief and IM are lost in the “fog,” controlled by the “combine,” cogs in a machine of power they can’t control. “Come out of the fog, young man,” Bledsoe says. But Blesdoe isn’t trying to help him see. The Statue of Liberty is also enveloped in fog when IM sees it from the office of one of the white men he gives letters to. But Blesdoe is like Nurse Rachted, a marginalized member of the system (the Combine) who has wrestled power from it and now uses it to his advantage. It’s been 25 years since I first read this book, and it’s such a crazy riff. You do just get sucked into Elison’s prose. And I keep noticing all these literary nuggets. IM talks about the college being “the best of all possible worlds.” He has to be Voltaire’s Pangloss on a journey, blind optimism interfering with reality.