Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (post 2): Is narrator incarnated but invisible, or a disembodied voice? Views of Prologue, Epilogue, Author's Introduction.

Prologue

“I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids…I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me” (1, p. 3).

Epilogue

“ ‘Ah,’ I can hear you say, ‘so it was all a build-up to bore us with his buggy jiving. He only wanted us to listen to him rave!’ But only partially true: Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do?” (1, p. 439).

Author’s Introduction

“For while I had structured my short stories out of familiar experiences and possessed concrete images of my characters and their backgrounds, now I was confronted by nothing more substantial than a taunting, disembodied voice…an ironic, down-home voice…the voice seemed well aware that a piece of science fiction was the last thing I aspired to write. In fact it seemed to tease me with allusions to that pseudoscientific sociological concept which held that most Afro-American difficulties sprang from our ‘high visibility’…But then as I listened to its taunting laughter and speculated as to what kind of individual would speak in such accents, I decided that it would be one who had been forged in the underground of American experience and yet managed to emerge less angry than ironic…And after coaxing him into revealing a bit more about himself, I concluded that he was without question a ‘character,’ and that in the dual meaning of the term…this has always been a most willful, most self-generating novel…” (1, pp. xiv-xxi).

Comment

As is true of many novelists, Ellison, intellectually, knew that he had imagined and thought up his narrator and main character. But that is not the way he experienced his creative process: His protagonist just seems to have arrived. He is confronted by it. He hears its voice. It has its own opinions and attitude. It seems to be self-generating, with a mind of its own. All of which describes the psychological experience of getting and having an alternate personality.

Although most characters and alternate personalities are embodied, it is not uncommon to have an alternate personality who is conceived of as a disembodied spirit of one sort or another.

1. Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man [1952]. New York, Random House, 1982.