Reading Response to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
In this passage the narrator describes himself as invisible in the non-literal sense. I believe that this state of invisibility is meant to resemble the pursuit of freedom from the corrupted society. “Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death. I myself, after existing some twenty years, did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility” (4). This quote from the passage derives the narrator’s true meaning of invisibility, being able to live his own death. Taking in all of the ‘advantages’ death has to offer to one escaping the turmoil of societies disposition between what is fair, right and wrong. Death is a power status that if metaphorically possessed by a living individual gives one the power to reform and renew themselves into the kind of people that they couldn’t be when people knew who they were. The ability to be in a crowd of people but to have no one know who you are, or to not be bothered by anyone of the thousands of things that a ‘living’ person has he possibility of encountering every day.
To be without form is to reenergize the mind into something more valuable than what was given in physical structure. To set the mind free of the limitations of the body, implied by the living death where the narrator uses the light and energy he draws from the power plant to ignite his mind rather than body, to view the world through a different lens outside of typical reality into a world where death is a tool of freedom and discovery that is often lost among the blackness of the world.
