Unit · Anchor: Invisible Man

Modernism

c. 1900–1950

Anchor text: Invisible Man — Ellison's Modernist arc told from within the Black American experience.

Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.

Vasily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1912

Ours is the first period when man has become completely and totally problematical to himself, when he no longer knows what he is, but at the same time knows that he knows nothing.

Max Scheler, The Human Place in the Cosmos, 1928

The old certainties are gone. Nietzsche announces that God is dead — and we have killed him. Freud argues that the self is not a unified rational agent but a battleground of unconscious drives. Einstein demonstrates that space and time are not absolute but relative. Wittgenstein concludes that language itself may be unable to express the things that matter most. The two World Wars have shattered the European confidence in progress and civilization that the Enlightenment bequeathed and the nineteenth century amplified. Invisible Man is a Modernist novel in the European philosophical sense, but it is also a novel written from within a specifically Black American experience — shaped by the Great Migration, the debate between Washington and Du Bois, and the daily reality of being looked at without being seen. Ellison’s narrator inherits Romanticism’s intensity but discovers that the self is far more complicated, more fractured, and more vulnerable than the Romantics imagined.