I've never been one to deplore my lack of quality education in public school. 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.

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. The many people that the hero meets in the course of his wanderings are remarkably various, complex and significant. It is a book that has a great deal to say and which is destined to have a great deal said about it.Īfter 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. 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. Ralph Elllison's Invisible Man is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of modern American Negro life. Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time

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