So I was pondering the ending of Invisible Man, and I can't help but notice how the narrator has
ended up in quite the lose-lose situation here. He has achieved this total
freedom of the opinions and judgments of others, but only because he never sees
anyone else! Is being this "free" really worth the cost? So I guess
the big question is whether or not we can read this as a happy ending.
When the narrator first descends into a hole, it was an
unintentional result of an intense chase scene, but having fallen he sees that
he was in a hole for his entire life. The narrator seems content with the
situation, but is this really different from any other time in the book when he
was happy and satisfied and we as readers were screaming at him to wake up and
smell the coffee, or at least smell reality?
Irving Howe criticized this novel because he felt that the ending
came far to suddenly: like "Oh I just fell this random manhole into the
absolute darkness, which is just like my life, and I'm going to stay down here,
because I don't really have a place in the world above, and I am going to 'find
the light' with my light bulbs and paper torches, and it will be great."
Well Mr. Howe, I happen to agree with you that the ending is sudden because it
goes from intense chase to epilogue in 3.5 seconds, but I utterly disagree that
this in any way takes away from the value of the novel. How you possibly expect
anything else having read the rest of the book? The entire thing has been
a well-crafted jumble of events that do not seem to lead into one another on
the surface, but do in fact convey a journey underneath. Each time the narrator
exclaims that he has been enlightened and will no longer act as he has been, he
gets one step closer to being the contemplative if slightly cynical figure in
the warm hole. Even if he often still seems to resemble the naïve boy from the
opening of the novel, his degree of naivety becomes continually less severe
with each humiliating encounter he experiences.
So we return to the beginning question: is the end of this
eye-opening journey actually a positive one for its sojourner? Nope not really.
I think that the only way for this novel to end truly happily is for it to end
unrealistically (yes the rest of the novel has avoided realism but not in the
same sense—I mean a fairy-tale ending here). Let’s say that the narrator’s
resurfacing was included in the ending, and he was received by everyone as
being the lost hero and was finally allowed to control his own actions and was
beloved and loved himself and everything was hunky-dory. This would be a happy
(if sappy and sickening) ending, but he would still be subject to the opinions
of everyone around him and incapable of truly being himself, as people would
always only see what they want to see. So the happiest ending I can imagine,
while impossible, is also not really happy from the narrator’s point of view.
Therefore, you see Mr. Howe, the only way to end this novel was
the way that Ellison did: an ambiguous and ironic situation. He can either be
free, or social; invisible, or trapped in a basement; alone, or misunderstood,
and not one of these options will really lead him to happiness. I think the best
we can hope for is for the narrator to be content with his singular existence. Even
the promise of a resurfacing doesn’t seem like it can be all that positive if
all he can do is start over with a bit more knowledge and a wider pair of eyes.
Yikes.
I agree--the binary "happy ending"/"not happy ending" doesn't quite apply in this case. (And to be clear, the ending isn't really a surprise to anyone who's read the prologue--the story is more an explanation of how that ending, which we all see coming, came to be.) The novel is not primarily concerned with showing how the conditions on the surface can be changed--it has to do with an individual's self-knowledge. It's not as if the narrator's circumstances will be radically different when he resurfaces, but he will be less gullible, less manipulable, less susceptible to others' plans for him (presumably--Ellison leaves dangling the question of whether such independent self-knowledge is even possible). The end of the novel is a kind of "challenge" for the reader--as if to say, know yourself in this way, strip away all these outside influences, and see what that means for how you understand your position in relation to others. Ellison might say that every character in his novel is "invisible" in some way. That "heightened consciousness" we see in the narrator has to do with his *awareness* of the fact.
ReplyDeleteGreat post Caroline! I hadn't though about the novel as classified with a good or bad, happy or sad ending. Honestly, I hadn't really thought about the ending in general because it was something I had been expecting throughout the novel. The ending left me content, but after reading this I feel like I shouldn't be. You make a good point about us realizing that there is greater potential for the narrator than he sees for himself. Like the beginning of the novel in the Battle Royal, we are unsatisfied with the narrator's incapability to realize his surroundings. At the end, there is still more for the narrator to accomplish with his life than he decides to do which leaves the reader feeling sort of...empty. Way to bring up this idea! :)
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