How are minorities treated in our culture? What justifications do white people make to themselves for this treatment? Do African-Americans ever show prejudice toward one another? The questions below test reader comprehension, suggest themes for in-depth discussion, and point the way toward more extensive reading and research. TEACHING IDEAS The questions, exercises, and assignments that follow are designed to guide your students through Invisible Man and to help them approach it as both a work of literature and a provocative critique of our society. Through it he asserts the excitement of human experience in a world in which the unexpected is always happening. Ellison's anti-realism stood out at a time when realism was the dominant fictional style, particularly in the protest novel. The novel also reflects the rhetorical richness of the African-American culture, using a wide range of idiomatic styles. It is surreal because 'life is surreal,' and it is funny often hilariously so because 'what else was there to sustain our will to persevere but laughter?'. Ellison wanted his novel to transcend the rage and hopelessness of the protest novel and assert a world of possibility, however remote. Despite this, in the end he chooses to reject cynicism and hatred and to embrace a philosophy of hope. The naive young man is 'educated' by being slowly disabused of all his ideals. When his innocent idealism lands him in trouble, he comes to understand the hypocrisy behind the school's professed philosophy and heads for the greater freedom of New York. He dreams of racial uplift through humility and hard work, a doctrine preached by the school and the larger Southern culture. Born and raised in the rural South, he is a star pupil at a college for black students. Shortly before his death Ellison acknowledged the fact that his novel had expanded the very meaning of the word 'invisible.' Invisibility, he said, 'touches anyone who lives in a big metropolis.' (New Yorker, 5/2/94) The novel's nameless narrator (the Invisible Man) is representative of many intelligent young African- Americans of his generation.

Ellison's hero is invisible within the larger culture because he is black, but his feelings can easily be understood by all those who experience the anonymity of modern life. The issues Ellison so powerfully addresses are those that confront everyone who lives in the modern world: not only racism but the very question of personal identity, our frustrated impulse to assert ourselves in a world which is metaphorically blind. 1 Invisible Man Written by Ralph Ellison NOTE TO TEACHERS Written in the politically and socially turbulent 1940s, Invisible Man is one of the definitive novels of the African-American experience it is also one of the definitive novels for all Americans.

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