I believe the point of the book is to show how the narrator achieves invisibility. We see his journey from impressionable, naive young man to sarcastic, meta-self-aware adult. But what disappoints me is that we never see the fruits of that. The story ends with a sudden fall into the black hole, then a time-skip of what, months? Years? We get a small story of seeing Norton again, and we can infer some things about his later life from his lights contact, his fight with Monopolated Light & Power, and other references in the prologue and epilogue. Other than that, we don't see nearly anything of what he actually does with this knowledge other than write it down (the frame narrative of Invisible Man.)
Howe said something similar to this at the tail end of "Black Boys and Native Sons." He writes, "as Ellison's hero asserts the 'infinite possibilities' he makes no attempt to specify them..." and this is my main complaint about the book. Ellison spends twenty-five chapters detailing this guy's life to tell us how he comes to this conclusion, then doesn't explain the conclusion other than the still-ambiguous "I am an invisible man" and "I can and do think in a meta way about myself" and worse, "I speak for you."
I don't agree with Howe on other aspects. He has no right to define an African-American novel to his own specifications. He can't just declare that angry black authors are the only ones who are really black, or really "black authors" in a certain sense. In fact, I agree with Ellison on most points involving the definition of an African-American novel. My only hesitation comes when I examine the book simply as a literary work that has an ending that feels like a cop-out.
What do you think? Is there a good justification for Invisible Man's brief ending? How would the book's message change if the "moral" were more clearly defined by the end? (Would that kill the point?) And can anyone find a good rebuttal on this from Ellison, because I totally couldn't.
