Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison Essay Questions/Discussion Questions

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Essay Questions/Discussion Questions

Choose One topic for your 1 ½ typed, double-spaced, 12-font essay on Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

Due Date: Typed/emailed by May 2, 2011.  For extra credit, presented to the class by May 1, 2011

1. What makes Ellison’s narrator invisible? What is the relationship between his invisibility and other people’s blindness—both involuntary and willful? Is the protagonist’s invisibility due solely to his skin color? Is it only the novel’s white characters who refuse to see him?
2. What are the narrator’s dreams and goals? How are these variously fulfilled or thwarted in the course of the book?
3. Is the reader meant to identify with the narrator? To sympathize with him? How do you think Ellison himself sees his protagonist?
4. What is the significance of the grandfather’s deathbed speech [p.16]? Whom or what has he betrayed? What other characters in this book resort to the same strategy of smiling betrayal?
5. The “battle royal” sequence portrays black men fighting each other for the entertainment of whites. Does Ellison ever portray similar combats between blacks and whites? To what end?
6. Throughout the book the narrator encounters a number of white benefactors, including a millionaire college trustee, an amiable playboy, and the professional agitator Brother Jack. What does the outcome of these relationships suggest about the possibility of friendship or cooperation between the races?
7. What black men does the protagonist choose as mentors or role models? Do they prove to be any more trustworthy than his white “benefactors”? What about those figures whose authority and advice the narrator rejects—for example, the vet in The Golden Day and the separatist Ras the Exhorter? What characters in Invisible Man, if any, represent sources of moral authority and stability?
8. Where in Invisible Man does Ellison—who was trained as a musician—use language to musical effect? (For example, compare the description of the college campus on pages 34-7 to Trueblood’s confession on 51-68, to the chapel scene on 110-135, and Tod Clifton’s funeral on 450-461.) What different sorts of language does Ellison employ in these and other passages? How does the “music” of these sections—their rhythm, assonance, and alliteration—heighten their meaning or play against it?
9. Write about any features or elements of jazz, blues music, Black spirituals, and call-and-response sermons you can in Ellison's writing style and narrative structure. What do these contribute to the novel?
10. Ch. 2, p34 -- "Driving Mr. Norton": Characterize Norton; characterize Trueblood. Why do you think Norton is so intent on meeting Trueblood? What are the IM's reflections on the encounter between them? Is Ellison using dramatic irony -- i.e., does the reader's understanding of the meanings of the encounter sharply differ from the IM's?
11. Ch 3, p71 -- "Golden Day": What do you recall about Black WWI vets from history and from 10th-grade work on the Harlem Renaissance? Is the brain surgeon vet right about Norton and about the Invisible Man?
12. Ch 4, p98 -- "Back to Bledsoe": Characterize Bledsoe. What is the Invisible Man’s view of him?
13. What is the significance of the Founder's posture in his statue on campus?
14. Why is Mr. Norton so affected by Jim Trueblood's story?
15. Why have white people lavished help upon Trueblood since his disgrace, when they ignored him before his crime?
16. Why do the students and teachers at the college hate and fear Trueblood and the other "black belt" inhabitants?
17. Why doesn't Dr. Bledsoe give the narrator a second chance at the college?
18. Ellison carefully lays out the geography of the state college for Negroes, with its whitewashed buildings, its black powerhouse, the barren road leading to the insane asylum, and the nearby shanties of the "black belt." How does this map symbolize the idealistic vision of the school and the hard realities of black life which the school's philosophy attempts to deny?
19. Mr. Norton is "a bearer of the white man's burden," a "symbol of the Great Traditions" (37). How does he personify the paternalistic ethos, for better and for worse?
20. Many critics suggest that the veterans at the Golden Day represent the repressed black middle-class--that these are the men who would have been the community's doctors, lawyers, teachers, and scientists had they been allowed the same opportunities as whites. Do you agree with this thesis?
21. The "doctor" at the Golden Day calls the narrator "a walking zombie, the most perfect achievement of [Norton's] dreams" (94). What does he mean by this? What is the narrator's reaction? Does he eventually come to share the doctor's opinion?
22. In 1963 the African-American author James Baldwin wrote: "In most of the novels written by Negroes until today...there is a great space where sex ought to be; and what usually fills this space is violence." Is this true of Invisible Man? What role do women play in the story? Are they even regarded by the narrator as being fully human?
23.  In what way is the riot at the end of the book reminiscent of the battle royal at the beginning?
24. What has accounted for the change in Mr. Norton's manner when he meets the narrator at the end of the book?
25. Why does Invisible Man move underground after the riot?
26. Who wrote the anonymous letter and why?
27.  Comment on the final dream of IM where all the major characters reassemble to discuss his progress-or regress. What do you make of the blinding/castration theme in the dream? Is he castrated or blinded or both? Of what illusions is he free? How does he interpret his dream?
28. At the end of the novel, Invisible Man says, "Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?--diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business they'll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one....America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain" (577). The debate between the value of diversity versus conformity--or consensus--is still very much alive today, more than forty years after the appearance of Invisible Man. What contribution does the novel make to this cultural debate?
29.  The narrator finally concludes that "Even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play" (581). This is an important tenet of Ellison's philosophy, for he believed that art should serve democracy. In what way is Invisible Man a novel that deals specifically with the problems and challenges of democracy?