Book: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Today I Finished Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I bought it several years ago because it was on several reading lists. However, I was unable to bring myself up to read it. I knew it was about a black young man, coming from the deep South, learning about the injustice of the society before the civil rights movement. I thought I would not be able to relate the black experience in America. The reviews in the book all rave about it, saying how energetic, forceful, savage it is. I thought I knew what this book is about.

Of course I am wrong. I should never assume I understand a great book before having the privilege to read it. Everyone has something to offer in life. Great authors have more to offer to me because I am tuned to written words. I've found the language of Invisible Man full of energy, strength, and humor. The idea about why he is an invisible man is not what I thought. It is not a book about how miserable a black man was in a society of injustice. It is really about one man's path of self discovery, of learning about reality and about life. It is relevant not particularly to certain race or country of people, but it is a lesson and experience shared with all people.

People are all basically invisible, because other people in the society (including themselves) refuse to see them as who they are. Everyone only sees what he wants to see, so other people become a figure, an idea, an abstract object to their view of the reality. We need to first understand this, and then to understand ourselves so we can see ourselves. After learning all this, we go into the absurd world and start living. The only way to live is to live with love.

Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it. - p.127

As the organ voices died, I saw a think brown girl arise noiselessly with the rigid control of a modern dancer, high in the upper rows of the choir, and begin to sing a cappella. She began softly, as thought singing to herself of emotions of utmost privacy, a sound not addressed to the gathering, but which they overheard almost against her will. Gradually she increased its volume, until at times the voice seemed to become a disembodied force that sought to enter her, to violate her, shaking her, rocking her rhythmically, as though it had become the source of her being, rather than the fluid web of her own creation. // I saw the guests on the platform turn to look behind them to see the thin brown girl in white choir robe standing high against the organ pipes, herself become before our eyes a pipe of contained, controlled and sublimated anguish, a thin plain face transformed by music. I could not understand the words, but only the mood, sorrowful, vague and ethereal, of the singing. It throbbed with nostalgia, regret and repentance, and I sat with a lump in my throat as she sank slowly down; not a sitting but a controlled collapsing, as though she were balancing, sustaining the simmering bubble of her final tone by some delicate rhythm of her heart's blood, or by some mystic concentration of her being, focused upon the sound through the contained liquid of her large uplifted eyes. // There were no applause, only the appreciation of a profound silence. - p.105

So why do I write, torturing myself to put it down? Because in spite of myself I've learned some things. Without the possibility of action, all knowledge comes to one labeled "file and forget," and I can neither file nor forget. Nor will certain ideas forget me; they keep filing away at my lethargy, my complacency.

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?