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    Invisible Man
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    Invisible Man
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    Invisible Man
    Audiobook18 hours

    Invisible Man

    Written by Ralph Ellison

    Narrated by Joe Morton

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

    Ralph Elllison's Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of modern American Negro life. It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching--yet always with elements of comedy and irony and burlesque that appear in unexpected places. It is a book that has a great deal to say and which is destined to have a great deal said about it.

    After a brief prologue, the story begins with a terrifying experience of the hero's high school days, moves quickly to the campus of a Southern Negro college and then to New York's Harlem, where most of the action takes place. The many people that the hero meets in the course of his wanderings are remarkably various, complex and significant. With them he becomes involved in an amazing series of adventures, in which he is sometimes befriended but more often deceived and betrayed--as much by himself and his own illusions as by the duplicity of the blindness of others.

    Invisible Man is not only a great triumph of storytelling and characterization; it is a profound and uncompromising interpretation of the Negro's anomalous position in American society.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateDec 21, 2010
    ISBN9780307915122
    Unavailable
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    Reviews for Invisible Man

    4/5

    2,834 ratings104 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This book follows the unnamed narrator through his memoirs which explain how and why he became invisible. He attends college, moves to New York City in the hopes of finding work to fund the rest of his college career but quickly loses his first job at a factory. Then he falls in with The Brotherhood, a group of both black and white people working together in brotherhood to promote peace. They hire the narrator on as a speaker to make speeches to crowds in Harlem.This book gives the reader an opportunity to view 1930s New York from the perspective of a black man, something that we (still) don’t see a lot of in fiction set in this time period. The narrator’s life is full of experiences that are way out of his control, and he is often a passive character with things just happening to him, rather than him choosing to do things. This is not accidental. One could take the universal view that everyone lacks a certain amount of agency in their own lives and ends up just going with the flow, but I doubt the author’s intent was to point out that universal truth. Rather, I think he meant to highlight how African Americans, especially before the Civil Rights Movement, were at the mercy of what white people wanted: because if they didn’t comply or go along with it, they could be killed or thrown in prison. The narrator ‘goes along with it’ until he simply can’t anymore; until he realizes just how much he has been used by others; until he ultimately decides to become invisible (or to accept his invisibility, depending on how you interpret things) and live underground.This book is a classic for a reason. It has also been included in The Great American Read list. It provides an import view on the African American experience in America. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to read a piece of classic 20th century fiction. Also, considering one of the author’s influences was Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, I would recommend it to anyone who enjoyed that book.
    • 3/5
      I would love to give this 3 1/2 stars, although I admire the themes, the message and some of the storytelling, I found the writing, overall, to be overwrought and distracting. The storytelling is very choppy and does not flow well. It was not a pleasurable read, nor was it always an engaging novel. Some chapters were brilliant, some were tedious and meandering. Can't wait to hear the reviews/discussion at book club!
    • 4/5
      This book was not at all what I expected. Detailing the life of our unnamed narrator, who is so profoundly alienated as a black man that he calls himself invisible, this masterfully written novel also manages to be very entertaining. Lots of action, twists, and humor, but with such an important message. Joe Morton was exceptional as narrator on the audio. I couldn’t get enough of this book, no matter how upsetting it was.
    • 3/5
      Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is another title from the list of 100 books compiled for the Great American Read. (Have you voted today?) I feel somewhat chagrined that I had never heard of this classic until I checked out this list. The reader follows a nameless narrator who tells the story of his days in college while living in the South to his move to New York City. As this is set in 1930-40 the racial/social divide is still quite stark even in the North and the author doesn't pull any punches in that regard (i.e. expect violence). The beginning starts out with our narrator underground and in hiding although we have no idea why. In explanation, he weaves a story full of brutality, bigotry, backstabbing, and political machinations. He leaves college and goes to NYC where he is recruited into the Brotherhood which purports to strive for equality among all men regardless of race. Events unfold quickly and he fully believes and embraces the cause. The fomenting of racial riots are underway in Harlem (his district) and at this pivotal moment he is pulled out of his district and sent on another assignment downtown. The reader is kept on their toes and always wondering (as the narrator is) just which side is the "right" side and what is truly motivating the men he has come to trust in this (to him) foreign city. What is the "true" self and how does one embrace it? Invisible Man chews this question over while telling a story of one man coming to terms with the racism (both overt and covert) of society which is told so convincingly that you'll forget it's a work of fiction at times. This is a dense book and took me far longer to read than I expected. Several interesting points were made and quite a few powerful passages but overall it doesn't rate higher than a 6/10 for me.A compelling and thought provoking point:"For history records the patterns of men's lives, they say: Who slept with whom and with what results; who fought and who won and who lived to lie about it afterwards. ...only those events that the recorder regards as important that are put down, these lies his keepers keep their power by." - pg 439
    • 5/5
      I was initially bored with this as I struggled to keep up with the seeming disjointed, tangential plotline. Eventually, though, I found myself sucked in and really enjoyed it.
    • 2/5
      Finally finished. I'm in the minority, I know, but I found this book less profound than headache-inducing. There were pockets of fascinating storytelling, but I found the main character to be seemingly incapable of conceiving of consequences, such that he constantly was being surprised by what happened next (and the corresponding crises of identity seemed to me overblown and unconvincing). That said, I freely acknowledge that my life experience has been in some ways quite sheltered, so who can day what crises of identity I might manufacture if my behavior were seen as a synecdoche for the nature of my race?
    • 4/5
      This is a debut novel by Ralph Ellison about what it's like to grow up as a black man in mid-century America. It has many experiences that show how blacks are treated just because they are black. This book should not be confused with H.G. Wells book where the invisible man was actually invisible. Race is what will keep this black man in his permanent underclass status thus denying him his humanity. It is a powerful read and should not be missed.
    • 3/5
      Obviously, this is an important book, but I found it a bit of a slog, I must admit. I was going along very well until the seemingly inevitable advent of the Communists into the story. At that point, the book bogged down for long stretches of almost inscrutable and not overly interesting meetings and speeches. The book reads more like an allegory than a novel, with some scenes veering into almost hallucinatory episodes, with not a lot to grasp onto for the reader. Characters tended to represent all the phases of black life in America. One man represents the old Booker T. Washington approach, leaning on education and good manners to get ahead. Another person represents Black Nationalism and another more violent activism. And so on. The unnamed narrator proceeds through interactions with each of these personifications and finds himself lost and invisible, living literally "underground," but finally ready to come out of hiding and try again as a fully actualized person in his own right. The early part of the book seemed the most engaging. It is easy to sympathize with the plight of the young student, doomed to fail despite his best efforts to keep the peace. All in all, this is my least favorite among the 3 great black novels written in the mid century, Native Son, Invisible Man and Go Tell It on the Mountain.
    • 3/5
      A good book, though much heavier than what is my normal reading collection. Not what I expected. Much more dysphoric than what I would have thought--almost like an acid trip in many parts of the reading. Not an enjoyable book, but it wasn't meant to be. It was meant to be important and I think it achieved that.
    • 4/5
      Ralph Ellison's classic 1952 novel about a black man who is sent away from his Southern college to New York City, where he experiences disillusionment, activism, violence, changes of identity, and absurdity. My reactions to this are book are complicated. I found the first couple of chapters extremely compelling, but as I read on, I often had trouble making up my mind about Ellison's writing style, sometimes feeling impressed, sometimes impatient. (It probably didn't help, I admit, that I insisted on picking it up at a time when my reading brain apparently would much rather have had some fluffy escapism.) I'm not entirely sure how much I can say I enjoyed reading it, to the extent that it's even reasonable to use a word like "enjoy" for something like this, anyway. But it is a book I feel very, very glad to have read, and I absolutely would not dispute its status as an important work of literature. As a social commentary, it's complex, devastating, and still painfully, horrifically, depressingly relevant all these decades later.Rating: When it comes to things like this, I think this simple ratings system fails utterly. For my own subjective experience of it, I'm giving it 4/5, but I'm aware that that falls short of recognizing Ellison's accomplishment.
    • 4/5
      "I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids--and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."Thus begins Ralph Ellison's classic, in which one man describes his experiences as an "invisible man." Of course, he didn't always know he was invisible, and thus the novel consists of a series of brutal events which led to his awakening.It opens with the man's graduation from high school in a small Southern town. As valedictorian, he delivered a speech positing that humility was the essence of progress for the black man. He is thrilled and proud when he is asked to repeat the speech at a white men's business association meeting. Instead, when he arrives expecting to present his speech, he is told he must take part in a "battle royale," in which he and several other black youths are blindfolded and must fight to the death (figuratively speaking) for the amusement of the drunken white men. Then, as payment, the youths are told they can pick up coins strewn on a carpet. When they reach for the coins, however, they receive electrical shocks, to the further amusement of the white men. Ellison's writing hits us in the face with this young man's fear, naivetee, helplessness and anger, all filtered through the lens of bitter irony:"What powers of endurance I had during those days! What enthusiasm! What a belief in the rightness of things!"His road to self-awareness continues as he attends, and then is expelled through no fault of his own, a black college. He finds himself once again betrayed when the head of the college sends him to New York for a summer to earn enough money to return to college, all the while sabotaging the narrator's attempts to find a decent job there. By the end of the summer he realizes he no longer fits in with "various groups still caught up in the illusions that had just been boomeranged out of my head," and for whom he "felt a contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream...."This book is a classic, and should be read by everyone. It is a dense read, and does contain a lot of polemical prose that could perhaps have been omitted. It is a sad book, and does not end on a hopeful note:"I remember that I am invisible, and walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers."
    • 3/5
      I give up. I know when I've been beaten, and the truth is I may never finish this classic. It's too heavy. The prologue is fantastic. It completely captured me and drew me in so well that I paid more than $9.99 for an eBook for one of the few times ever. But the exposition, the stories themselves which explain why the author feels and thinks as he revealed in the prologue, are not nearly as captivating as the prologue. I may skip ahead to hopefully enjoy the epilogue (assuming there is one since the book must be close to 1000 pages in print), but I would be surprised if I ever have the urge to revisit the body of the story. I know it's a classic, but this is my honest assessment.
    • 4/5
      Classic, wonderfully read, and with a devastating view of being black in America... The unnamed narrator is not all that likable, and there really isn't much of a plot... at 18-1/2 hours, it does drag a bit, but an important piece of American literature nonetheless.
    • 4/5
      Joe Morton does an excellent narration!
    • 5/5
      This is a wonderful book that I'll probably have to read multiple times to truly be able to comprehend it. It won the National Book Award in 1953.Its about an African American man who is "invisible" to the world around him, solely on fact of who he is. From his time as a young man, he is the valedictorian of his high school, but is is forced to fight other young black men in a "battle royal" in front of white business leaders in order to vie for a scholarship. To, his time in NYC working for an urban organizing group called the Brotherhood, where his earnest efforts to work for the people of Harlem get nowhere and "progress" comes thru rioting.A book that I believe has profound impacts still today, especially in light of the BLM movements. I was hooked by Ellison's eloquent prose in his introduction.Some quotes that struck me (probably more than I should post, oh well):"But that's getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead""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""A clock ticked with empty urgency, as though trying to catch up with the time.""I watched them, feeling very young and inexperienced and yet strangely old, with an oldness that watched and waited quietly within me."9/10S: 8/5/16 - F: 9/23/16 (50 Days)
    • 4/5
      I am amazed that this book was written and published in the United States in the 1950s. A frank discussion of race relations in New York/Harlem at the time.
    • 5/5
      Beautiful prose. I loved the lyricism of his words. His writing flows. This book is a timely today as when it was written and during the time it is set. Unfortunately not much has changed in the U.S. regarding how people are seen or not seen and used. Everyone needs to read this.
    • 4/5
      I am amazed that this book was written and published in the United States in the 1950s. A frank discussion of race relations in New York/Harlem at the time.
    • 4/5
      Ellison asks a lot of his narrator — he needs him to be innocent enough to make many of the scenes humorous, or at least not horrifying. And yet the narrator also needs to go through a crisis of identity — to gain enough understanding of the world by the end to be paralyzed. I think people tend to gravitate to either of those characteristics, but not both. I like the scene in the Golden Day. Others like the prologue and epilogue. To me the humor is what separates Invisible Man from a Go Tell it on the Mountain or a Native Son — you want to read it again and so you get more out of it.Ellison never finished another novel. I think this one is a pretty good note to leave on, but it would have been interesting to see another facet of Ellison. Invisible Man is a Magnum Opus, a Great Novel, an attempt at the Meaning of Life. If he'd tried for just an engaging story, I wonder what would have come out?
    • 5/5
      This is a masterpiece. The novel is a masterpiece. As is this performance of it here.
    • 5/5
      Someone I deeply respect recommended this book in light of everything that's happening in the world, or I should say that's still happening in the world - and we're in 2021. This book is powerful, not easy to read in parts, but I feel it has expanded my mind.
    • 5/5
      No place here for a plot summary or analysis of the beautifully imbricated layers of metaphor. This book is a stone cold classic. Political, artistic, improvisational, wise. A book for the world that still lives. One of my favorites.
    • 1/5
      I have nothing good to say about this book. I didn't like a single part of it. I don't have a single stirring quote from it to share. It started and ended disturbingly; and in between featured copious amounts of speechifying and boredom.
    • 4/5
      It take about 200-300 pages to get into the book, but the payoff is tremendous. I enjoyed the book much more upon re-reading. It's quite different from other Harlem Renaissance works in that it's less political and more allegorical, confronting the issue of individuality vs. groupthink as well as the American Dream.
    • 4/5
      Joe Morton is a fantastic narrator. And he is perfect for this particular story.

      The story, itself, is a little rambley. And that's because it's written in the first person with a narrator who is a little rambley. And not always wrapped real tight. As he learns that the world isn't as he believed, that people in power are more interested in power than in other people, it breaks him.
    • 5/5
      This work, written while Southern blacks were still oppressed by Jim Crow, chronicles what it was like to come of age in mid-twentieth-century America as a black man. The title is apt: The main character, whose name is never disclosed by the author, feels as though he is invisible to the world. This is true not only in the American South but also in the American North. Eventually, he learns to embrace this invisibility and leaves readers wondering about their own invisibility towards the rest of the world.

      This book starts out in a Southern collegiate setting and then transitions to Harlem. The main character originally aspires to a life of freedom in New York, much like Frederick Douglass had as a free man in the nineteenth century. However, instead of freedom, the main character experiences several weird happenings – things as grotesque as being involved in a boxing match or seeing a dear friend be shot to death as a cop. And as much as he would like to put the cloak of professional respectability on his life, he begins to realize that blacks are also oppressed in New York.

      The grotesqueness of modern life harkens to the genre of Southern Gothic. Ellison wants us to see the author as the “everyman” of the black male and ultimately to see ourselves in him as just an everyman. I find that Ellison is successful in this task, and evidently, many others have as well as this book won a National Book Award in 1953.

      Like many writings that address racism, the written word does a great job at confronting our bigotry. Black skin and white skin (and the many shades in between) are more muted on the page to the occasional adjective. Instead, words open us up to our common human experience which transcends petty discriminations.

      This book would still serve high school students well as a coming-of-age text. Eyes (like mine) would be opened to what it was like – and is in some respect still like – to ease into American society as a black man. We are all very much invisible. That is, our thoughts and feelings are often irrelevant to the larger society around us. Nonetheless, we must speak and acts because our words can save us – save only us, not our fellow humans. We are worth saving because we are human. That struggle for self-esteem and self-dignity conveys the journey each of us is on. Ellison’s work was and is masterful in communicating this theme.

    • 5/5
      Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" is an example of why I find reading books from 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die. "Invisible Man" was not on my radar -- and I knew nothing about it when I picked it up, but it was definitely among the best books I've read this year. In the novel, our unnamed "invisible" narrator, is a black man who experiences oppression in a variety of ways -- through violence and fear in the south and then, in a more insidious manner in the north -- where manipulation and betrayal surge beneath a veneer of brotherhood and integration. This novel really spoke to me-- I found it moving, heartbreaking, angering and devastating.
    • 4/5
      Bijwijlen harde, surrealistische, hilarische opeenvolging van de vernederingen van een ongenaamde zwarte jongen uit het Zuiden, die gedwongen wordt zijn heil te zoeken in Harlem; daar aansluiting vindt bij een links Broederschap, carri?re maakt, maar al snel weer van zijn voetstuk valt en duidelijk de hypocrisie van mensen en organisaties doorkrijgt. Hij besluit voortaan "onzichtbaar", ondergronds te leven.Dit boek deed me denken aan Dostojevski's Herinneringen uit het Ondergrondse, met zijn bijna ondragelijke openheid, en aan Celines Voyage au bout de la Nuit, met zijn onversneden negativisme. De stijl is wervelend en trefzeker-zakelijk tegelijk. Alleen het einde viel me een beetje tegen: na de apocalyptische plunderscenes bloedt het verhaaltje voorspelbaar leeg, want we komen weer bij het uitgangspunt terecht.Maatschappelijk is dit een hard getuigenis van de discriminatie van de zwarten in de Amerikaanse samenleving toen (jaren 40-50), maar bij uitbreiding slaat het op alle "kleine" mensen, ook in onze huidige samenleving (migranten, vluchtelingen...), of - voor wie wil - een illustratie van Sartre's "L'Enfer c'est les autres". Al eindigt het wel op een oproep tot engagement en actie.
    • 4/5
      Ellison asks a lot of his narrator — he needs him to be innocent enough to make many of the scenes humorous, or at least not horrifying. And yet the narrator also needs to go through a crisis of identity — to gain enough understanding of the world by the end to be paralyzed. I think people tend to gravitate to either of those characteristics, but not both. I like the scene in the Golden Day. Others like the prologue and epilogue. To me the humor is what separates Invisible Man from a Go Tell it on the Mountain or a Native Son — you want to read it again and so you get more out of it.Ellison never finished another novel. I think this one is a pretty good note to leave on, but it would have been interesting to see another facet of Ellison. Invisible Man is a Magnum Opus, a Great Novel, an attempt at the Meaning of Life. If he'd tried for just an engaging story, I wonder what would have come out?
    • 5/5
      I am giving this book 5 stars even though I did not enjoy reading it. A classic that somehow passed me by years ago, Invisible Man recounts the existential story of a black man who goes through life trying to find his identity and purpose in a bleak world. At times the story seems surreal, and I am sure parts of it went over my head. The experiences the narrator, who is given no name, describes are often brutal and confusing. The story itself is rather circular and ethereal in an evil sort of way. Which is why I can't say I 'enjoyed' this story. But this is a very good book, well written and worth reading. I might even re-read it someday.