Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

let your necrophily Feed upon that carcase.

I am an invisible man.

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.

It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves.

! trauma body keeps score

You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time.

You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's seldom successful.

! fighting to be seen trauma

his lips were frothy with blood.

they suspect that power is being drained off, but they don't know where. All they know is that according to the master meter back there in their power station a hell of a lot of free current is disappearing somewhere into the jungle of Harlem.

@

Now, aware of my invisibility, I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century, which I discovered when I was trying to escape in the night from Ras the Destroyer.

the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.

Fire story brain

I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine,

! Fire

(Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy.)

! fire

her eyes ran in bilious jelly up the chimney.

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.

Ideological becoming !

Nothing, storm or flood,

Ben lerner

Yet when you have lived invisible as long as I have you develop a certain ingenuity.

How we become

I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing "What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue" -- all at the same time.

my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin.

!

Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he's made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he's unaware that he is invisible.

Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you're never quite on the beat.

The smart money hit the canvas.

The yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent's sense of time.

Love it ! magic mountain

descended, like Dante, into its depths. And beneath the swiftness of the hot tempo there was a slower tempo and a cave and I entered it and looked around and heard an old woman singing a spiritual as full of Weltschmerz as flamenco, and beneath that lay a still lower level on which I saw a beautiful girl the color of ivory pleading in a voice like my mother's as she stood before a group of slave owners who bid for her naked body, and below that I found a lower level and a more rapid tempo and I heard someone shout: "Brothers and sisters, my text this morning is the 'Blackness of Blackness.' " And a congregation of voices answered: "That blackness is most black, brother, most black . . ." "In the beginning . . ." "At the very start," they cried. ". . . there was blackness . . ." "Preach it . . ." ". . . and the sun . . ." "The sun, Lawd . . ." ". . . was bloody red . . ." "Red . . ." "Now black is . . ." the preacher shouted. "Bloody . . ." "I said black is . . ." "Preach it, brother . . ." ". . . an' black ain't . . " "Red, Lawd, red: He said it's red!" "Amen, brother . . ." "Black will git you . . ." "Yes, it will . . ." ". . . an' black won't . . ." "Naw, it won't!" "It do . . ." "It do, Lawd . . ." ". . . an' it don't." "Halleluiah . . ." ". . . It'll put you, glory, glory, Oh my Lawd, in the WHALE'S BELLY." "Preach it, dear brother . . ." ". . . an' make you tempt . . ." "Good God a-mighty!" "Old Aunt Nelly!" "Black will make you . ....

Dante ideologies !

I loved him and give him the poison and he withered away like a frost-bit apple. Them boys woulda tore him to pieces with they homemake knives."

Beloved !

"Hey, Ras," I called. "Is it you, Destroyer? Rinehart?" No answer, only the rhythmic footsteps behind me. Once I tried crossing the road, but a speeding machine struck me, scraping the skin from my leg as it roared past.

No country for old men !

the terrifying serenity that comes from days of intense hunger.

I haven't smoked a reefer since, however; not because they're illegal, but because to see around corners is enough (that is not unusual when you are invisible). But to hear around them is too much; it inhibits action.

Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.

Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial.

Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement.

too snarled in the incompatible notions that buzzed within my brain.

I am nobody but myself.

our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction.

agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open."

"Learn it to the younguns," he whispered fiercely; then he died.

In those pre-invisible days I visualized myself as a potential Booker T. Washington.

I noticed a certain merchant who followed her hungrily, his lips loose and drooling.

his posture clumsy like that of an intoxicated panda, wound his belly in a slow and obscene grind.

the men began reaching out to touch her. I could see their beefy fingers sink into the soft flesh.

There was nothing to do but what we were told.

It was as though I had suddenly found myself in a dark room filled with poisonous cottonmouths.

the blindfold was as tight as a thick skin-puckering scab

My saliva became like hot bitter glue.

He kept coming, bringing the rank sharp violence of stale sweat.

"Pick it up, goddamnit, pick it up!" someone called like a bass-voiced parrot. "Go on, get it!" I crawled rapidly around the floor, picking up the coins, trying to avoid the coppers and to get greenbacks and the gold.

!

The answer from the friendly vessel came back: "Cast down your bucket where you are."

Booker t

cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded . . .' "

(What powers of endurance I had during those days! What enthusiasm! What a belief in the rightness of things!)

A rope of bloody saliva forming a shape like an undiscovered continent drooled upon the leather and I wiped it quickly away.

wild roses that dazzled the eyes in the summer sun. Honeysuckle and purple wisteria hung heavy from the trees and white magnolias mixed with their scents in the bee-humming air.