Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

  • Invisible Man

  • A Novel
  • By: Ralph Ellison
  • Narrated by: Joe Morton
  • Length: 18 hrs and 36 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (162 ratings)
Offer ends May 1st, 2024 11:59PM GMT. Terms and conditions apply.
£7.99/month after 3 months. Renews automatically.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Invisible Man cover art

Invisible Man

By: Ralph Ellison
Narrated by: Joe Morton
Get this deal Try for £0.00

Pay £99p/month. After 3 months pay £7.99/month. Renews automatically. See terms for eligibility.

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £16.99

Buy Now for £16.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Listeners also enjoyed...

Beloved cover art
The Sound and the Fury cover art
Their Eyes Were Watching God cover art
The Invisible Man cover art
Perchance to Dream cover art
The Hunger and Other Stories cover art
Juneteenth cover art
Paradise Lost cover art
The Last Temptation of Christ cover art
To the Lighthouse cover art
Miss Lonelyhearts cover art
As I Lay Dying cover art
Heart of Darkness: A Signature Performance by Kenneth Branagh cover art
Fahrenheit 451 cover art
Dracula [Audible Edition] cover art
Brave New World cover art

Editor reviews

An idealistic young man strives to make his way among the like-minded of his own Black community and the larger white world beyond only to experience cascading disillusionment in both. He is The Invisible Man, the protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s masterpiece, electrifying today, and devastatingly so when published in 1953. A richly poetic and cinematic work carrying a searing social critique, the novel features a first-person narrative that seems written to be heard as much as read. And the actor reading to us here seems to have been born for the role; as the movie trailers say, Joe Morton is The Invisible Man.

From his nameless and hidden existence in a Manhattan basement, our narrator leads us through the events leading to his identity — or lack of one. A high school valedictorian down South, he receives a scholarship from a white group — after being brought onstage for a humiliating, bigoted burlesque. Honored at his Black college to chauffeur a visiting white benefactor, he accedes to the request to take a fateful detour through the town’s Black slums. As a result, the college’s president, a venerated yet utterly Machiavellian figure, scapegoats him. Expelled and directed north for redemption and employment, he again becomes the fall guy, literally and figuratively, when he is injured and laid off from his job in a union-embattled New York City factory.

Nursed back to health by the kind, maternal Mary up in Harlem, he seems to find his calling at the unlikely event of an elderly couple’s eviction. Spontaneously addressing the roiling crowd to temper their rage lest it incite the armed white evictors, the injustices he shares with them by race, as well as those befalling him for less obvious reasons, impassion him to eloquently encourage their defiance. His oratory draws him to the attention of Jack, head of ‘the brotherhood’ (Ellison’s stand-in for the Communist movement), who offers him work — and successfully indoctrinates him with utopian propaganda and sets him up to lead the party’s Harlem chapter. Seduced by his prestige among the party’s white sophisticates and a long-craved sense of purposefulness he embraces his work, even standing down Ras, an afro-centric nihilist violently competing for followers. Intrigue upon intrigue later, a more sinister threat reveals itself in his dogmatically ruthless brother-mentor plotting to further his cause even at the expense of others’ lives. Racism, our narrator shatteringly learns, is but one form of man’s inhumanity to man. And so, he has hibernated, invisibly, until now, until a stirring in his soul and imagination suggests the possibilities of his own spring.

Propelled largely through its characters’ richly defined verbal personae, the novel is perfectly realized by Joe Morton’s masterful, dramatically distinct vocal embodiments; the protagonist himself is, not surprising, his tour de force. In the end, we experience the sensibility of actor and author as one and the same: a perfect match-up indeed. —Elly Schull Meeks

Summary

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.

©1952 Ralph Ellison (P)2010 Random House

What listeners say about Invisible Man

Average customer ratings
Overall
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    119
  • 4 Stars
    27
  • 3 Stars
    13
  • 2 Stars
    3
  • 1 Stars
    0
Performance
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    136
  • 4 Stars
    5
  • 3 Stars
    2
  • 2 Stars
    1
  • 1 Stars
    0
Story
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
  • 5 Stars
    98
  • 4 Stars
    28
  • 3 Stars
    15
  • 2 Stars
    2
  • 1 Stars
    1

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.

Sort by:
Filter by:
  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

I had to read this book as part of my university module, I had not heard of it before. I found it excellent, interesting and riveting.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Mindblowing

I listen to a lot of audiobooks and my favourite narrators are Frank Muller, Richard Poe and Samuel West, but as an individual all-round performance I think this is the greatest I've ever heard, including Frank Muller's Moby Dick and Richard Poe's Blood Meridian. Of course it helps that, like them, Mr Morton is working with a masterpiece too

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

A MUST READ

Masterpiece of the highest order!

So much of what the invisible man witnessed back in 1942 is still being employed today. Biden is Brother Jack, Clifton and the Brotherhood is BLM and Bledsoe is Don Lemon.

The only difference is there’s so many more invisible (Black) men in 2021.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Outstanding narration!

Why why why? Had I left this for so long. An excellent book which took me on such a journey.
Stephen Fry is the best at narrating for me however this has equalled him. Joe Morton has excelled in making me put this in my all time top 20! Bravo!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Lucidity

Relatablility throughout.

Fascinating as a delve away from the academic historical literature.

it's a humanistic and polemic mix I think that the uninitiated like myself enjoy and find illuminates in much needed ways, particularly on his experiences in Harlem, coming of age among peers and community.

Overall a kind of 'what they never tell you at Sunday School', sharply more significant and culturally relevant for today.


The dialogue with and about characters, the references to Black historical figures punched through my modern apathetic TV age mentality on matters.

It works. It demands to read.

It's perhaps my longest Audible listen.

I want to read another Ralph Ellison.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

A literary treat of style and great substance, narrated by a fantastic voice actor.

The novel was fantastic, and the narrator was just as fantastic as the material. Amazing audiobook.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Stunning through and through!

A brilliant audiobook. This might be one of the best audiobooks ever produced! True perfection!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

A great performance of a great book.

Joe Morton's reading is quite simply the best I have heard on Audible. Thoughtful, passionate, funny and scary. The book is one that everyone ought to read--and is as timely now as when it first appeared.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Ahead of its time

The battle royal get this going, onto a slapstick satire of the all black university life, to being lost in NYC, the paranoia and absurdity of the Unions and non-unionised Labour force, a bizarre medical episode of electrodes to the brain, pain and recovery. Onto the brilliant final vision of the science of the brotherhood (the communists) and their cynical use of the black folk in their world political game… Việt Than Nguyen’s The Sympathiser feels like it grows out of this amazing novel.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Good story

Very good storytelling, I’ve only read the first two chapters but I’m very interested in where the book will end up.

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!