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.
In some ways I like how open the ending is because by leaving the narrator with infinite possibilities while before he was often faced with a choice between only a few options or no choice at all, Ellison emphasizes how freeing the narrator’s understanding of his own invisibility is. I also think elaborating on the narrator’s future might have drawn away from the real focus of discovering invisibility. Mostly though, I also find the ending frustrating. I would have loved to get a better sense of how the narrator uses his understanding of how the narrator would use his understanding of his invisibility and especially how he would want to fit into and change society when he re-emerges. Nice post!
ReplyDeleteI would posit--and I understand that this might not be a fully satisfying answer--that the writing of the narrative itself is the "story" of his unspecified time underground. Time passes between the prologue and the epilogue: he sets out to account for himself and to explore his experience in a critical and ironic way, and the act of writing changes him and his ideas, and he's arrived somewhere new at the end, with his optimistic reading of his grandfather's "curse" (which he claims to have just arrived at, not having thought about it this way earlier), and his conviction that he needs to reemerge and play a "socially responsible" role. It's true that that new role is unspecified: but what if it means he's going to be a *writer*, that he *has* formed this new observational and critical and self-aware identity through the process of sorting through his experiences in writing? Is this at all satisfactory?
ReplyDeleteTo me it made sense for the book to end the way it did when it's read as a slightly fictionalized autobiography of Ellison. Ellison simply writes down what happens to him but the entire time he is writing, he is staying in the same spot. I feel that the "climax" you are looking for is supposed to happen after the narrator gets out and publishes his book and people recognize the invisibility he is talking about (?)
ReplyDeleteI was a little confused on the ending too, but as we thought and discussed in class, I think it leaves it open to the reader to do what they want with their invisibility. Ellison puts the questions out there, but we might not always have the same solutions and actions as the narrator. It leaves it open-ended so that we can have our own reflections as well.
ReplyDeleteFirst off, when I read that intro sentence at first I thought it was deep, motivational quote, so then the ending threw me off, but definitely in a way that made me want to read the whole post. To answer your question, I agree with Ayat that the ending is Ellison leaving it open and being vague on purpose. Nice post!
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