![]() He is recruited into the Brotherhood, a mysterious organisation that claims to fight for social equality. Returning to Harlem, he witnesses the eviction of an elderly Black couple and makes an impassioned speech against injustice. He finds work at a paint factory, turning black paint into pure white, but is tricked into causing an explosion, and is briefly institutionalised and given shock treatment. After mistakenly escorting one of the college’s white patrons, Mr Norton, to a brothel, he is expelled and makes his way to New York City. He wins a scholarship to a prestigious Black university, but is forced to take place in a brutal boxing match for the entertainment of the town’s white dignitaries to receive his prize. ![]() Raised in a small town in the South, he is haunted by the advice of his grandfather, a freed slave, to resist white oppression. Introducing himself as “ an invisible man… simply because people choose not to see me”, he lives in a state of “hibernation”, which he explains as “ a covert preparation for a more covert action“, and relates his life story. What it’s about: Harlem, New York City, the 1950s. An unnamed Black man lives, alone and unnoticed, in the basement of a house wired with hundreds of light bulbs, lit with stolen power from the city’s electrical grid. ![]() In which I review Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s phantasmagoric 1952 novel about an unnamed black man coming of age in the Jim Crow South and the tumult of Jazz-Age era Harlem. ![]()
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