Invisible Man
We rely, in this world, on the visual aspects of humanity as a  means of  learning who we are. This, Ralph Ellison argues convincingly, is a  dangerous habit. A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952,Invisible Manchronicles the travels of its narrator, a young, nameless  black man, as he moves through the hellish levels of American  intolerance  and cultural blindness. Searching for a context in which to know  himself,  he exists in a very peculiar state. "I am an invisible man," he says in  his prologue. "When they approach me they see only my surroundings,  themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and  anything except me." But this is hard-won self-knowledge, earned  over the course of many years.As the book gets started, the narrator is expelled from his Southern  Negro college  for inadvertently showing a white trustee the reality of black life in  the south, including an incestuous farmer and a rural whorehouse. The  college director chastises him: "Why, the dumbest black bastard in  the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to  tell  him a lie! What kind of an education are you getting around here?" Mystified, the narrator moves north to New York City, where the truth,  at least as he perceives it, is dealt another blow when he learns that  his former headmaster's recommendation letters are, in  fact, letters of condemnation.What ensues is a search for what truth actually is, which proves to be  supremely elusive. The narrator becomes a spokesman for a mixed-race  band  of social activists called "The Brotherhood" and believes he is  fighting  for equality. Once again, he realizes he's been duped  into believing what he thought was the truth, when in fact it is only  another variation. Of the Brothers, he eventually discerns:   "They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their  voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves....  Here  I thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no  difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't  see  either color or men."Invisible Manis certainly a book about race in America, and  sadly enough, few of  the problems it chronicles have disappeared even now. But Ellison's  first novel transcends such a narrow definition. It's also a book about the human  race stumbling down the path to identity, challenged and successful to  varying degrees. None of us can ever be sure of the truth beyond  ourselves, and possibly not even there. The world is a tricky place,  and  no one knows this better than the invisible man, who leaves us with  these  chilling, provocative words: "And it is this which frightens me: Who  knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?"--Melanie Rehak