I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids-and I might even be said to possess a mind.
I want you to overcome ’em with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.Learn it to the younguns.” In the following passage, the protagonist struggles with his grandfather’s words. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Throughout the novel, he grapples with the dying words of his grandfather: “Son, after I’m gone I want you to keep up the good fight. He navigates relationships with people of different races in experiences that take him from a traditionally Black college in the South to the streets of Harlem. The unnamed narrator is a young Black man seeking recognition of his personhood as an individual. Ralph Ellison was a Black novelist and essayist whose novel Invisible Man was published in 1952 and won a National Book Award the following year.
The act of rising above the ordinary to a superior state