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Situational Irony
Prologue
Explanation and Analysis:
In Invisible Man, Ellison writes in a style that is highly metaphorical and packed with allusions to a broad range of topics, from history and literature to popular music and cinema. The first paragraph of the novel exemplifies this dense and intricate style:
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.
First, he begins with the notion of social invisibility, the central metaphor of the novel. He is, he claims, “an invisible man” because “people refuse to see” him. This metaphor, in which the narrator imagines that others literally cannot see him due to his status as a Black man, is revisited multiple times in the novel. Further, Ellison alludes to the gothic, ghost-filled literature of 19th-century American writer Edgar Allen Poe, and to the “Hollywood-movie ectoplasms” of popular film and science fiction. At the end of this passage, he describes himself as being “surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass” like those of a circus, which prevent others from seeing him directly. This densely metaphorical and referential style characterizes much of the novel.
Related Themes:
