Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" as a Parody

 In guiding his protagonist toward mature consciousness, Ellison relies upon parody. A form of burlesque, parody imitates the typical style of an author or literary genre for comic effect. Ellison lampoons individual works like H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897), in which Griffin achieves invisibility through a successful science experiment, and Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864), a text boasting an existentialist unnamed protagonist who creates many of his own dilemmas.


 

In Invisible Man the episode in the El Toro Bar, where Brother Jack gives the protagonist his assignment of being the chief spokesman of the Harlem District of the Brotherhood, gains nuance by Ellison’s sly parody of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926). The painted panels of bullfighting scenes recall the importance of this metaphor in Hemingway’s text and foreshadow the protagonist’s fate within the organization. 

Ellison simultaneously caricatures particular literary genres. The trajectory the narrator follows parodies the slave narrative genre where South to North geographical movement typically signifies the writer’s changing fortunes from slavery to freedom. Ellison’s narrator follows a similar route, but his Northern experiences deny the traditional freedom associated with the region. Instead, the narrator’s New York life confirms modern black Americans’ need for a revised path to emotional freedom.

Ellison proclaims his protagonist’s progression along this path by granting him new facility with figurative language. The frames of the text in particular exemplify the mature narrator’s fondness for, and mastery of, metaphor, a word or expression in which a comparison is implicit. His opening proclamation, “I am an invisible man,” asserts the density of the narrator’s perception of his identity (3). Vividly contrasted against his inability to see himself or anyone else in complicated terms throughout the framed portions, his espousal of an invisible status attests to his radical growth. The metaphor also represents Ellison’s sense of the appropriate relationship between artistry and politics in fiction. 



In his rejection of critic Irving Howe’s claim that his work lacked legitimacy because it failed to address racial politics directly, Ellison counters that protest might assume different forms: “It might appear in a novel as a technical assault against the styles which have gone before, or as a protest against the human condition. If Invisible Man is even ‘apparently’ free from ‘the ideological and emotional penalties suffered by Negroes in this country,’ it is because I tried to the best of my ability to transform these elements into art” (Collected Essays 183). Accordingly, rather than announce the sociopolitical debate his novel considers, he packages it in metaphor.


Works Cited:

  • Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Vintage, 1989.
  •                      -The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Edited by John Callahan. New York: Modern Library, 1995.


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