I have just finished, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, a remarkable book.

At first I thought the invisibility of the narrator was about his being Black in America. As I got deeper into the book, it became apparent that Ellison is speaking of the human condition: People do not see one another, do not really know who it is that they are talking to, or even who they themselves are..

Something in the Epilogue struck me and I want to share it:

... I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied -- not even I. On the other hand, I’ve never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to “justify” and affirm someone’s mistaken beliefs; or when I’ve tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear. In my presence they could talk and agree with themselves, the world was nailed down, and they loved it. They received a feeling of security. But here was the rub: Too often, in order to justify them I had to take myself by the throat and choke myself until my eyes bulged and my tongue hung out and wagged like the door of an empty house in a high wind. Oh, yes, it made them happy and it made me sick. So I became ill of affirmation, of saying “yes” against the nay-saying of my stomach -- not to mention my brain.

Through a series of devastating experience, the narrator’s ambitions, hopes, and dreams are shattered, as are his illusions. In a way, this book reminds me of Dostoyevsky’s Note From the Underground. except that Ellison’s narrator -- even at the bottom of the dark pit -- never becomes a nihilist, he continues to grapple with whether love can overcome hate.

Offering no false hope or easy salvation, the invisible man’s final message leaves us with the possibility that the total shattering of illusions may lead us beyond devastation to a new emergence: a “shaking off of the old skin.”