Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”: Meaning of Title; Relation of Nameless, Unreliable Narrator and Rinehart to Dostoevsky, Melville, Multiple Personality

In the opening paragraph of Invisible Man (1952), the nameless narrator says he is invisible because people refuse to see him. But he is unreliable. Ellison calls him “the hero who is somewhat of a liar” and says “That’s what you have to be alert to whenever you read fiction in the first person” (1, p. 267). Also search “nameless” and “namelessness” in this blog for posts on its relation to multiple personality.

Ellison says, “The invisibility, there is a joke about that which is tied up with the sociological dictum that Negroes in the United States have a rough time because we have high visibility…High pigmentation…But the problem for the narrator of Invisible Man is that he creates his own invisibility to a certain extent by not asserting himself…” (1, p. 96).

“Ellison…modeled his narrator after the nameless narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground” (2). That’s the same Dostoevsky who wrote The Double, a classic multiple personality story (search “Dostoevsky” and “The Double” in this blog).

Regarding another character in Invisible Man, Rinehart, Ellison says, “I was thinking of a character who was a master of disguise…"(1, p. 18). “He’s a descendant of Melville’s Confidence Man” (1, p. 76). Search “Confidence Man” in this blog to read my post on Herman Melville’s novel about a man with multiple personality.

1. Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh (Editors). Conversations with Ralph Ellison. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

2. Invisible Man. Wikipedia.