Invisible Man and African American radicalism in World War II

Ellison's references to "sacrific[ing]" the Harlem members pursuant to an emphasis on "national and international" issues and "temporary alliances with other political groups" (428, 502) offer a recognizable version of this wartime shift. Recognizable, too, are some of the consequences--loss of members (502) and the top officials' reversals of their previous positions (464). The protagonist's pained interview with Hambro (500-06) may owe something to similar experiences of Richard Wright. (14) The force of the protagonist's hopes, corrupted but also heightened by the sense of anticipating and controlling history, suggests the impact of the Brotherhood's betrayal: loss of confidence in an agency for a fraternal society.

In Invisible Man's closing chapters and epilogue, which go beyond the critique outlined so far, Ellison's protagonist grapples with this loss first by hinting at a spontaneist form of Marxism (15) and then by elaborating a more fundamental shift in which he drops a revolutionary standpoint in favor of one of long-term ameliorative struggle, deepens his political and cultural identification with ordinary African Americans, and tries to express his newly developed sense of African Americans' relation to US ideals, US history, and the lives of other oppressed people. Like the portrayal of the Brotherhood, these aspects of Invisible Man are closely related to historical context. Their most likely sources are, first, Ellison's friendships with Richard Wright and other dissident Marxists in the period when Ellison was moving away from the Communist Party and, secondly--and more fundamentally--the March On Washington and "double V" movements among African Americans during World War II.

The first shift, felt earlier in the novel, certainly reflects Ellison's close relationship with Wright. By 1942 Wright had silently dropped out of the Communist Party, while Ellison and Angelo Herndon, in the short-lived Negro Quarterly, were maintaining ties with it while taking a more critical view of the war than the CP would then countenance. In 1944 when Wright made public his break with the Communists, Ellison regarded Wright and presumably himself as favorable to communism but not to the Party or its leaders, whom he called "bankrupt" (Letters, 29 Aug. 1944; see also 5 Sept. 1944). Ellison's continuing closeness to Wright, the dissident leftist's hatred for the Communist Party, and the maturing radical's belief in freedom and popular upheaval are all on display in a letter of August 1945, written when he was starting Invisible Man. Calling the Communists dangerous because "they still speak in the name of the only possible future," Ellison goes on:

   I would like very much to talk with
   you concerning independence of
   thought. I believe we should serve
   notice on them [the CP] that, godamit,
   they are responsible to the Negro people
   at large even if they do spit in the
   faces of their members and that they
   must either live up to their words or
   face a relentless fire of mature,
   informed criticism.... If they want to
   be lice, then by God let them be
   squashed like lice.