The lower frequencies: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and what it means

The narrator of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man experiences pretty much every variety of exploitation and degradation of black men in America in the 20th century; his journey is not so much from innocence to experience but from innocence to exile - it parallels Huck's journey, in a way, though it begins where it end, in an off-the-grid underground retreat and not heading out for the territories. Think of the range of experience Ellison packs in to his novel - the Battle Royal in front the crowd of hostile whites (who end by condescendingly giving him a college scholarship), the subservience to the white benefactors at the all-black college, his banishment by the college president, the rebuffs as he tries to find a job, the humiliation of working in the paint factory, his abuse by the doctors at the factory, his use as a pawn in the hands of various radical and progressive groups, his use by various white women to fulfill their sexual fantasies (it's kind of amazing that he has virtually no relationships or even contact w/ black women of his own age throughout the novel) - no wonder that he withdraws in the end, as he realizes he has been duped by the progressive Brotherhood, a Stalinist left-wing group that uses him as a front, and by the black-power apostle Ras, who uses him to stir up trouble and violence. The final chapters are quite dense but also beautiful and mysterious, and they helped me to see that the IM is certainly the voice of the black American male but also speaks for all writers - especially as Ellison describes the reason for the retreat into invisibility - to try to discern the meaning of his own experiences, a process that leads him, as he says at the end, to get ready to re-enter society. Isn't this, in a way, the experience of all serious writers? Writers make their lives public, they "express" their thoughts and feelings and ideas, while becoming invisible in and of themselves - we see the words but not the person. To write is, even if temporarily, to withdraw from experience in order to reflect and translate experience into words. The Invisible Man is each of us, as Ellison says in the famous final sentence of the novel, which, to paraphrase, goes: Who knows but that, at the lower frequencies, I may also speak for you? I love that mysterious "lower frequencies," as if we've been not reading a novel but hearing a transmission, on some obscure band on the FM dial, broadcast only late at night and accessible only to the insomniacs who stumble upon it by chance. I have spent many hours on those frequencies.

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