Invisible Man

A Novel

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Invisible Man

By: Ralph Ellison

Narrated by: Joe Morton

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About this listen

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.

Action & Adventure

African American

Classics

Fiction

Genre Fiction

Literary Fiction

Thought-Provoking

Science Fiction

Social justice

Africa

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Critic reviews

"A book of the very first order, a superb book." —Saul Bellow

Most relevant

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.