Ralph Ellison

The Argument

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is the great American novel of the second half of the twentieth century, and its central argument is theological before it is political. The nameless narrator is invisible not because he lacks substance but because white America has refused to see him — has projected onto him a figure of its own imagination and responded to that figure rather than to the actual man. This is the literary rendition of what theologians call the denial of the Imago Dei.

Ellison drew on the blues tradition, on Black vernacular culture, on the specific theological imagination of the Black church — which had always known that you could be fully human and be treated as less than human, and had sustained its people through that knowledge with a combination of grief and defiant joy. The narrator's journey through the novel is a journey toward the recognition that his invisibility is their problem, not his identity.

For literary apologetics, Ellison is essential because he shows what happens to a culture — to any culture — when it refuses to see certain people as fully human. The refusal does not change the metaphysical fact. But it does enormous damage to the people it is visited upon, and, Ellison insists, to the culture that practices it. A culture that cannot see Ralph Ellison cannot see itself.