Invisible Man and African American radicalism in World War II

African American Review, Fall, 2005 by Christopher Z. Hobson

With the partial exception of Joseph F. Trimmer's "The Grandfather's Riddle in Invisible Man" a generation ago, most interpretations have taken no note of the divisions in the protagonist's comments, have focused on their first section, and have bled some of the radicalism even out of this part. Thus, Steele's often brilliant discussion of Ellison's individualist and communitarian commitments quotes part of the protagonist's words (without comment) in the context of the need to give "new life" to "democratic ideals," which in turn, quoting Chantal Mouffe's Dimensions of Radical Democracy, she defines as "common recognition of a set of ethico-political values ... allowing for a plurality of specific allegiances and for the respect of individual liberty" (Theorizing 191, 200-01). In effect this reading limits Ellison to advocacy of US pluralism, as his left-wing critics have charged. Similarly, John F. Callahan believes that the "principle" that the protagonist affirms is "different from his grandfather's strategy.... Invisible Man affirms America as a metaphor for possibilities that are democratic, provided individuals take personal responsibility for the country's principles" ("Chaos" 140-41). Partly adequate to explain the first part of the protagonist's reinterpretation, such views do not account well for the others, and they miss or discount the point that he sees his comments as an interpretation, not a repudiation, of his grandfather's meaning. Further, most interpreters believe the grandfather himself, as the protagonist long assumed, counseled "pretense, concealment, masking," and thus that the protagonist's reflections must be a "contrived reinterpretation" (Callahan, "Chaos" 139; Blake 129). (26) Trimmer, finally, notes that each section of the protagonist's speech begins with a redefinition of his question; that the sections focus on the relations of African Americans to the United States, the importance of African American experience, and the importance of general human experience; and that "each new question does not cancel the validity of the question that precedes it. The result is therefore cumulative, and we suspect that the grandfather would say yes to all three possibilities." But Trimmer sees the solutions as "metaphysical" or "existential," and concludes that "the solution to the novel's riddle is the novel," a version of the view that the novel validates art over politics (49-50).

In answer to the riddle of what his grandfather meant by "overcome 'em with yeses," then, the protagonist has his first partial insight:

   Could he have meant--hell, he must
   have meant the principle, that we were
   to affirm the principle on which the
   country was built and not the men, or
   at least not the men who did the violence.
   Did he mean say "yes" because
   he knew that the principle was greater
   than the men, greater than the numbers
   and the vicious power and all the
   methods used to corrupt its name? Did
   he mean to affirm the principle, which
   they themselves had dreamed into
   being out of the chaos and darkness of
   the feudal past, and which they had
   violated and compromised to the point
   of absurdity even in their own corrupt
   minds? (574)