In his novel Invisible Man (1952), Ralph Ellison (1914-94) incorporates the metaphorical invisibility of the black man in the white world with that which many regard as the fundamental theme of 20th-century literature. Employing elements of jazz, blues, and African-American folklore and fusing them with modernist literary techniques that include realism, surrealism, and overt symbolism, Ellison merges the two traditions to depict the novel's black protagonist as a quintessential existential hero, asking significant questions about identity, choice, and meaning. In a work that combines echoes of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's (1821-81) Notes from the Underground, T. S. Eliot's (1888-1965) The Waste Land, and Louis Armstrong's recording of "Black and Blue," Ellison, in the words of the critic Albert Murray, "had taken an everyday blues tune . . . and scored it for full orchestra." As a result, the novel won international acclaim, but, at the same time, it drew a certain amount of negative reaction from militant blacks, who saw in the "universalization" of its protagonist a dimunition of his particularly black character. Ellison's response to his critics is reflected in his comment that there is no reason why a novel about a black man "could not be effective as literature and, in its effectiveness, transcend its immediate background and speak eloquently for other people." The debate over the novel's racial politics has continued in the years since its publication, although few deny its status as a work of art.

Invisible Man is a picaresque novel, a type of tale in which the protagonist undergoes a series of seemingly unrelated incidents; the plot moves incrementally rather than developmentally. The novel opens with a prologue in which the narrator, an anonymous black man, has taken refuge from a race riot that has broken out in Harlem. He is living in a cellar wired with hundreds of lights. The lighting helps to offset his realization that he is invisible, at least to white people: When they look at him, they see not an individual, but a black man, an object to be used for their own purposes. In the novel's first chapter, the narrator flashes back to his graduation from high school and the puzzling advice he receives from his dying grandfather. The old man instructs the idealistic young man to "yes" the white man to death, to "overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins." What follows is a description of a "battle royal" among young black teens, staged for the entertainment of the prominent men in the Southern town, cheering on the boys as they savage each other. At the conclusion of the fight, the bloodied, young narrator, who has been chosen as the speaker of his graduating class, delivers his earnest, pious declaration and is awarded a leather briefcase, containing a scholarship to a southern Negro college (modeled on Tuskegee Institute, which Ellison once attended). But that night he dreams that his grandfather tells him to open the briefcase, where he finds a letter that reads, "Keep This Nigger-Boy Running."

Undaunted, still clinging to his belief in a kind of Horatio Alger-like future, the narrator leaves college without graduating, after a wild, farcical incident with a white benefactor. He comes to New York, where he secures a job in a paint factory, noted for the "purity" of the whiteness of its paint. Here the narrator becomes the hapless victim of another comic catastrophe, losing his job as a result. Now living in Harlem, he becomes acquainted with the Brotherhood (the Communist Party), who enlists him as a black recruiter in the Harlem community. His success there causes some jealousy among the Brotherhood leaders, and he is transferred downtown to speak on women's issues. When trouble appears to be developing in Harlem, partly the result of the activities of a black separatist, Ras the Exhorter, he is called back there, but by now he has become increasingly aware that the party is cynically exploiting him and the entire black population for its own ends. In the meantime a full-blown race riot breaks out in Harlem, which, the narrator realizes, the Brotherhood has provoked. Caught in the middle of the violence, he falls into a manhole and finds refuge in the cellar described in the prologue. In the epilogue that concludes the novel, the narrator prepares to abandon his underground home and to engage the world, chastened and disciplined by his naive mistakes, but not entirely disillusioned. In spite of everything he has been through, he has not abandoned the possibility, remote as it may be, that the day would come in America, when, as Martin Luther King, Jr., later expressed it, a man would be judged not by the color of his skin but by the content of his character.

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