The Ambiguous Ending of Invisible Man

            One of the large criticisms of the novel is that the ending “too optimistic” and “not protesty enough”.  Although I was not expecting the ending to go in the direction it went, I think that its “strangeness” is left up for many different interpretations. I think one must look at the beginning before making any judgments on the ending.  In the prologue, the narrator says, “I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either” (3).  Many critics were blasting Invisible Man for not protesting enough and the narrator tells them on the very first page of the novel that this is not a protest novel!  In my opinion, the novel is still a protest novel, but from Ellison’s perspective, not the narrator’s.   What the narrator says does not necessarily mean it is what Ellison believes, nor does Ellison necessarily want everyone to follow the narrator’s advice.

            The “point” of the novel is not to tell everyone to go curl up in a hole in the ground and find your own identity -- that is just the story of the narrator.  Later in the prologue, the narrator says he “is in a state of hibernation” (6).  Hibernation is a temporary state that will result in eventual reemergence.   At the end of the novel the narrator is still in a state of confusion that he has trouble articulating:

There seems to be no escape.  Here I’ve set out to throw my anger into the world’s face, but now that I’ve tried to put it all down the old fascination with playing a role returns, and I’m drawn upward again.  So that before I finish I’ve failed (maybe my anger is too heavy; perhaps, being a talker, I’ve used too many words).  But I’ve failed.  The very act of trying to put it all down has confused me and negated some of the anger and some of the bitterness.  (579)

Instead of viewing this ending state as what Ellison wants the reader to do/take away, this scene can be read as Ellison warning the reader of how the narrator’s course of action has failed.  He still needs a “role” to play -- even if it is the role of an “invisible man”.  This can be thought of as, yet again, the “boomerang” coming back into the narrator’s face after another wave of the naïve optimism.  Maybe these “infinite possibilities” are not quite as the narrator imagined them moments ago (576).

Craziness in Invisible Man

           From the beginning of Invisible Man, Ellison blurs the line between sanity and insanity/craziness. As we approach the end of the book, we can see how part of the narrator’s discovery of invisibility correlates with becoming “crazy”.  The Prologue narrator fits the description of what American society would stereotypically call crazy.  He lives in “a hole in the ground”, doesn’t seem to partake in any socializing, pulls a knife on a guy for calling him a name, has 1,369 light bulbs in a tiny room, and mentally goes through some pretty strange stuff while listening to Armstrong’s “Black and Blue” (6).   As the “Prologue” narrator is typing out the novel, we see glimpses of his perspective on craziness in contrast to the “present” narrator’s naive optimism regarding the system that is abusing him.   As the book progresses, the “present” narrator begins to realize how this system is completely absurd and crazy and that the only choice he has is to play along with the craziness, but now he is at least in on the joke. 

            Ellison uses the ironical inverse of the narrator’s external “respectability” to show how he has no other options. Is the narrator really more crazy at the end of the novel than at the Battle Royale scene?  There is no option for the narrator to not be crazy:  either he plays along with this crazy system or completely rejects the system and lives outside of society.   Both of these options are “crazy” in completely different ways.  Ellison uses the American “stereotypes” of craziness to define the Prologue narrator to contrast the even more absurd and crazy mindset that the narrator has from the beginning of the novel.   The fact that the narrator in the beginning of the novel does not even acknowledge the craziness of society is what makes his mindset “more” crazy than that of the Prologue/ending narrator.

            After the narrator “discovers” Rinehart, he begins to doubt his reality and question his past “crazy” mindset:

What is real anyway? But how could I doubt it?  […] It was true as I was true.  [Rinehart’s] world was possibility and he knew it. He was years ahead of me and I was a fool.  I must have been crazy and blind.  The world in which we lived was without boundaries. […]  It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable could be believed.  Perhaps the truth was always a lie.  (498)

This passage summarizes Ellison’s “inverse” descriptions of craziness. Everything the narrator thought was true at the beginning of the novel has a much more serious, negative counterpart he gradually has become aware of.  The “truths” he believed (that “society” believes) are absolutely crazy and absurd, and what he used to consider “crazy” at the beginning of the novel now seems completely reasonable. Ellison uses the narrator’s discovery of this to show how unbelievably illogical and irrational our society is. 

(Sorry this blog post was a little “crazy”—what does that symbolize?[probably just the mental state of the author])