Content provided in partnership with
Invisible Man and African American radicalism in World War II
African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Christopher Z. Hobson
way forward. Both these aspects are intimately tied to the protagonist's just-enunciated conception of African Americans' relation to the United States and its political system, and in this sense the epilogue has a high degree of intellectual coherence.
- More Articles of Interest
- John F. Callahan, ed. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: A Casebook
- Ralph Ellison's invisible man: invisibility, race, and homoeroticism from...
- Eloquence and Invisible Man
- The critical response to Ralph Ellison. - book review
- Masquerade, magic, and carnival in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man - Critical...
Ellison's metaphor for these potentialities and the sociopolitical situation is, appropriately, the "hole" itself, the protagonist's basement dwelling. This refuge has most often been interpreted as signifying unresolved tensions in Invisible Man's plot, Ellison's aesthetics and politics, or both (e.g., Blake 129; Schaub; Thomas 88-89). Yet the "hole" cries out to be seen as a symbolic social space: it is located in a black-white "border area," in a "building rented strictly to whites," and in a "section of the basement shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century" (5-6). In short, it is a spatial metaphor for the social position of African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century, and the protagonist's presence there signifies African Americans' status after the events from 1895 to the 1940s to which the narrative has given imaginative form. Hence also his sojourn, the possibilities open to him while he remains, and his anticipated emergence from hibernation (6, 13) and from the "hole" itself (581) represent events in the lives of African Americans as a group during a particular historical period.
More specifically, this underground refuge is a social and historical space for recovery and recuperation. Though not an arena for active social struggle, neither is it one of solipsistic retreat; it is a presumptively temporary locale for preparing new actions. In particular, it is where the protagonist receives, from the slave woman of his reefer vision, his understanding of "ambivalence," love and hate, in his relations to the United States (12), and it is where he fashions strategic concepts that he believes may guide the race in the future (574-75). If we take seriously the cellar's historical dimension, the implication is that this retreat is necessary for the protagonist and his group to think through their positions in the US and prepare their next step.
The ambiguous possibilities for social activity present in the epilogue, none fully satisfactory or fully preferred over the others, thus represent real historical potentialities. The first, and in its own way most "American," is individual autonomy within a society of limited freedom. When the protagonist claims that the world contains "infinite possibilities" (576), he is noting its unpredictability, its potential for Rinehartian "chaos," but also positive opportunities, as Lawrence Jackson has put it, for "navigating" the "morass of white racism" while attaining greater "personal freedom" ("Sharpies" 91, 84). Within this perspective the novel's life stance is one of endurance through powerlessness; its cultural target is that Eisenhower-era bugbear, conformity; and its positive aspiration, transcending the 1950's framework, is "diversity," what today is called multiculturalism (577). To the insistence of some critics that these ideas constitute a retreat, that the novel defines only an "attitude of ironic withdrawal from the white world" that is, "if not affirmation, at least acquiescence" (Blake 129), one must reply that personal autonomy and the possibility of enduring within a protective racial culture--especially in a social world as rigid as that of the 1950s--are not inconsiderable goals.
Find Research Guides for:
Find Featured Titles for: Reference
- Academe
- African American Review
- African Arts
- African Studies Review
- Afro-Americans in New York Life and History
- Alabama Heritage
- Alabama Review
- American Mathematical Monthly, The
- Anglican Theological Review
- Annals of Dyslexia
- Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ)
- Auk, The
- Australian Journal of Anthropology, The
- Christian Century
- Natural History
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »