Use of Irony in Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man"
Irony, the use of words to convey an idea that departs from its literal meaning, underpins many of the protagonist’s earliest experiences in Ellison's Invisible Man. In particular, Ellison’s use of structural irony reveals his authorial goals because we, along with the mature writer-narrator whom we meet in the prologue, observe an incredibly naïve central character stumbling towards self-understanding. This pervasiveness of structural irony, or the reader’s perpetual sense of knowing more than the narrator, allows Ellison to have fun as he inserts his protagonist into various conundrums. In addition to injecting bursts of humor, the comic aspects of his narrator’s experiences facilitate Ellison’s artful handling of the weighty issues that he invites readers to explore. The novel’s first episode sets this tone.
In the battle royal scene, the narrator’s earnest recitation of his Washingtonian valedictory speech, one which exhorts his audience of white segregationists to join hands with blacks to attain economic success, reaches the heights of absurdity. His mouth full of blood and his body spent from the violence of the fight and the electrified rug, the narrator’s commitment to such a policy emerges as sadly ironic.
The high irony of the smoker scene fittingly brims over into the protagonist’s college experiences. Distinguishing his mature sensibility from his youthful acceptance of surface appearances, the narrator commences his recollections of his undergraduate days by reevaluating the statue of the Founder. In his invisible state, he sees the bronze “hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil . . . above the face of a kneeling slave.” Yet from his more knowing position, he questions whether he is “witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding” thus revealing his ability to analyze the statue, which represents the existent Booker T.
Washington Monument (1922) called “Lifting the Veil” located on Tuskegee University’s campus, with ironic insightfulness (36). By contrast, the protagonist’s experiences as a student underscore his extreme inability to grasp the complicated personalities he meets. His adventure with Norton provides a telling example. He dismisses his observations of the trustee that fail to line up with his preconceived notions of powerful white men. As Norton quixotically declares the protagonist his “fate,” the narrator wonders, “But you don’t even know my name” (45). Similarly, he detects that the powerful man’s violent response to Trueblood’s tale of incest is laced with “something like envy and indignation,” but he refuses to recognize the irony of Norton’s position. Where Trueblood ponders his thorny circumstances and concludes he “ain’t nobody but” himself, the millionaire trustee declares he can know himself only through the actions of others and cannot physically handle hearing about socially taboo actions he desired to, but could not, commit (66).
The reader, of course, perceives the irony that the protagonist misses. Thus, when the naive student feels convicted by the blind Reverend Homer A. Barbee’s homily, a thinly veiled attempt to inspire undergraduates with renewed reverence for the college’s mission and president, readers anticipate his disastrous meeting with Bledsoe. Incensed by the protagonist’s conduct with Norton, the college president’s candid questions and uncensored revelations throw the narrator into a tailspin, and he only regains his footing when Bledsoe reassumes his duplicitous facade. Looking at the protagonist “like a man about to flip a coin,” Bledsoe clearly decides to exploit the boy’s inability to read human character (144). His offer to introduce the narrator to powerful men in New York tests the young man’s powers of perception: the irony inheres in the protagonist’s failure to discern that he faces an exam.
Ellison exploits irony on a larger scale in the novel’s overarching structure. The experiences that fill the bulk of the text, along with the narrator’s final decision to reproduce his life in written form, denote Ellison’s adaptation of the bildungsroman and kunstlerroman. For his purposes, these genres offer a rich template for rendering what he declares the central theme of America, the search for identity. He extols nineteenth-century authors like Mark Twain who craft fiction that probes the country’s thorny contemporary dilemmas without compromising artistry. For Ellison, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Twain’s most celebrated work, symbolizes the essence of what the American novel should accomplish, and he declares its bildungsroman format an integral attribute of its success. After labeling Huck’s decision to steal Jim the climax of the novel, Ellison explains that Twain was aware of the “irony” inherent in the romanticized vision of blacks as symbols of man while slavery denied their humanity; accordingly, Huck’s “acceptance of the evil implicit in his ‘emancipation’ of Jim represents Twain’s acceptance of his personal responsibility for the condition of society” (Collected Essays 89). Huck’s development culminates in his demonstration of a cultural maturity matched only by the author who creates him.
Ellison’s protagonist, like Twain’s, is defined by his unformed, or at least very malleable, view of the world. The structural irony his immaturity establishes contributes more than comic relief. His questioning appraisal of society represents the historical moment that he inhabits. Summing up the aptness of Huck’s youth, Ellison asserts “the historical justification for his adolescence lies in the fact that Twain was depicting a transitional period of American life; its artistic justification is that adolescence is the time of the ‘great confusion,’ during which both individuals and nations flounder between accepting and rejecting the responsibilities of adulthood” (Collected Essays 89). Invisible Man sets its sights on a similar goal. Ellison considers the mid-century United States an analogous transitional moment and formulates his protagonist’s journey accordingly. Unlike the essentially linear trajectory that Huck follows on his developmental journey, physically delineated by the consistently southward flowing Mississippi River, Ellison’s protagonist’s psychological transformation is marked by his northward movement, which results in a frustrating circularity before the protagonist grasps the irony of his comportment toward society.
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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