The Invisible Man

This week marks the first real week back in school, and I have to say, it has gone relatively well. We haven’t really had any major tests, aside from the impossible AP Lit essay, or homework. One thing that I have started at home is reading the Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. To be honest, the novel is nothing like I expected it to be. When hearing the title Invisible Man, I thought about a science fiction novel about a man that somehow became biologically invisible and experienced many things in the world from a unique perspective. The man had maybe made himself irreversibly invisible and had somehow conveyed some sort of life lesson through the events that happened to him. This of course is nothing like the actual novel, which I suppose is good because it makes for a very interesting storyline. In the first few lines of the novel, Ellison details that the character is invisible from a figurative sense because he has been ignored due to the color of his skin. The invisibility basically comes not from the fact that people can not see him, but because they refuse to acknowledge him as well as the rest of the African Americans in the US. This brings about a very interesting discussion topic as it was clear that equal rights for all minorities was a big problem, but nothing was really done about it until Martin Luther King Jr. and many other leaders forced the world to realize the situation. It was almost as if the world, or at least the US, could not see the invisible problem despite being apparent to many. This invisibility, which translates into a lack of action by the majority of people, has been a problem for centuries and I can only guess that the novel will go on to discuss the invisibility in greater depth.
During the many liberation movements and civil rights movements that have occurred throughout history, there have been many similarities. One is that people realize that there is a problem, but not much is done about it until a leader appears and takes the situation in his or her own hands. This is exactly what happened with Gandhi in South Africa and in India as he let the people rise up against the oppressive British. It is also exactly what happened with MLK as he led the African Americans and other minorities to fight for their rights against the oppression faced in the US. In both cases, the problem was apparent, but remained invisible to the general public as nothing was done about the issues for a long time. Another example can be with the feminist and women’s rights movements as chauvinistic tendencies had been around forever, but it took the efforts of a few women, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others at conventions such as the Seneca Falls Convention, to really get the ball rolling in passing suffrage amendments. I haven’t really read enough of the novel to understand the story line, but after looking through the first couple of pages, I realize why the name Invisible Man can mean more than its literal definition, but can also encompass the struggle of the oppressed.