Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form.

Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one's form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility.

That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!

If you become a good farmer, a chef, a preacher, doctor, singer, mechanic -- whatever you become, and even if you fail, you are my fate. And you must write me and tell me the outcome."

"One of the very first, no doubt," he said, dabbing at the blue-veined eyes. "A trustee of consciousness." "What was that?" I asked. "Nothing . . . There now, he's coming out of it."

Already he's learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He's invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir! The mechanical man!"

He who had left them quick, in the prime of his manhood, author of their own fire and illumination, returned to them cold, already a bronzed statue.

But I've made my place in it and I'll have every Negro in the country hanging on tree limbs by morning if it means staying where I am."

"I hope so," I said. "And you take it easy." "Oh, I'll do that. All it takes to get along in this here man's town is a little shit, grit and mother-wit. And man, I was bawn with all three.

The thing to do, I thought with a smile, was to give them hints that whatever you did or said was weighted with broad and mysterious meanings that lay just beneath the surface. They'd love that.

But it was strange how life connected up; because I had carried Mr. Norton to the old rundown building with rotting paint, I was here.

"Everybody has to be trouble to somebody.

The lobby was the meeting place for various groups still caught up in the illusions that had just been boomeranged out of my head:

"It's just hard times you going through," she'd say. "Everybody worth his salt has his hard times, and when you git to be somebody you'll see these here very same hard times helped you a heap."

Other than Mary I had no friends and desired none. Nor did I think of Mary as a "friend"; she was something more -- a force, a stable, familiar force like something out of my past which kept me from whirling off into some unknown which I dared not face. It was a most painful position, for at the same time, Mary reminded me constantly that something was expected of me, some act of leadership, some newsworthy achievement; and I was torn between resenting her for it and loving her for the nebulous hope she kept alive.

thought of Bledsoe and Norton and what they had done. By kicking me into the dark they'd made me see the possibility of achieving something greater and more important than I'd ever dreamed.

He laughed. "Remember too, that theory always comes after practice. Act first, theorize later; that's also a formula, a devastatingly effective one!"

On the way to work one late spring morning I counted fifty greetings from people I didn't know, becoming aware that there were two of me: the old self that slept a few hours a night and dreamed sometimes of my grandfather and Bledsoe and Brockway and Mary, the self that flew without wings and plunged from great heights; and the new public self that spoke for the Brotherhood and was becoming so much more important than the other that I seemed to run a foot race against myself.

as though the discordantly invisible and the conspicuously enigmatic were reaching a delicately balanced harmony. She's rich but human, I thought, watching the smooth play of her relaxed hands.

All our work had been very little, no great change had been made. And it was all my fault. I'd been so fascinated by the motion that I'd forgotten to measure what it was bringing forth. I'd been asleep, dreaming.

explode in our face." I sighed. "Your faces are safe, Brother," I said. "Can't you see that they don't think in such abstract terms? If they

dark glasses and a white hat could blot out my identity so quickly, who actually was who?

Perhaps only Rine the rascal was at home in it. It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.

What was integrity? What did it have to do with a world in which Rinehart was possible and successful?

I looted at him quickly. "Learned what?" "That it's impossible not to take advantage of the people."

If they tolerate Rinehart, then they will forget it and even with them you are invisible.

And now I looked around a corner of my mind and saw Jack and Norton and Emerson merge into one single white figure. They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me. I was simply a material,

except I now recognized my invisibility.

All they wanted of me was one belch of affirmation and I'd bellow it out loud. Yesl Yes! YES! That was all anyone wanted of us, that we should be heard and not seen, and then heard only in one big optimistic chorus of yassuh, yassuh, yassuh! All right, I'd yea, yea and oui, oui and si, si and see, see them too; and I'd walk around in their guts with hobnailed boots. Even those super-big shots whom I'd never seen at committee meetings. They wanted a machine? Very well, I'd become a supersensitive confirmer of their misconceptions, and just to hold their confidence I'd try to be right part of the time.

She was fair game and perhaps she'd find me black enough, after all. A committee meeting was set for tomorrow, and since it was Jack's birthday, a party at the Chthonian would follow. Thus I would launch my two-pronged attack under the most favorable circumstance. They were forcing me to Rinehart methods, so bring on the scientists!

Why should I worry over bureaucrats, blind men? I am invisible.

There was something I had to do and I knew that my forgetfulness wasn't real, as one knows that the forgotten details of certain dreams are not truly forgotten but evaded.

and knowing now who I was and where I was and knowing too that I had no longer to run for or from the Jacks and the Emersons and the Bledsoes and Nortons, but only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine. I stood there, knowing that by dying, that by being hanged by Ras on this street in this destructive night I would perhaps move them one fraction of a bloody step closer to a definition of who they were and of what I was and had been.

And I knew that it was better to live out one's own absurdity than to die for that of others, whether for Ras's or Jack's.

"No," I said. "I'm through with all your illusions and lies, I'm through running."

Well, let them. I was through and, in spite of the dream, I was whole.

And now I realized that I couldn't return to Mary's, or to any part of my old life. I could approach it only from the outside, and I had been as invisible to Mary as I had been to the Brotherhood. No, I couldn't return to Mary's, or to the campus, or to the Brotherhood, or home. I could only move ahead or stay here, underground. So I would stay here until I was chased out. Here, at least, I could try to think things out in peace, or, if not in peace, in quiet. I would take up residence underground. The end was in the beginning.

So I became ill of affirmation, of saying "yes" against the nay-saying of my stomach -- not to mention my brain.

And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man. Thus I have come a long way and returned and boomeranged a long way from the point in society toward which I originally aspired.

But live you must, and you can either make passive love to your sickness or burn it out and go on to the next conflicting phase.

Now I know men are different and that all life is divided and that only in division is there true health. Hence again I have stayed in my hole, because up above there's an increasing passion to make men conform to a pattern.

Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many -- This is not prophecy, but description.

sell you no phony forgiveness, I'm a desperate man -- but too much of your life will be lost, its meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and I hate and I love.

I'm coming out, no less invisible without it, but coming out nevertheless. And I suppose it's damn well time. Even hibernations can be overdone, come to think of it. Perhaps that's my greatest social crime, I've overstayed my hibernation, since there's a possibility that even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play.

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