Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man As Jazz
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man As JazzInvisible Man As Jazz
Invisible Man by Ralph (Waldo) Ellison, is intriguingly complex. It narrates the history of a life, but is unfinished at the end. Its incomplete structure echoes that of jazz music, where the written form does not contain the extent of the music. In this way, Ellison uses the book to prepare the reader for something, for some final confrontation which is suggested but never recounted. It is a chronology of a man manipulated (monopolated) by those about him until he realizes the extent of the control and rebels against it — or begins to.
The force of the novel is tied to its openendedness. Ellison leads the reader through changes upon changes: of location, characters, ways in which the narrator connects to the reality around him. When the novel ends, the reader’s mind is still braced for those continuing changes, and, deprived of them, the mind continues, creating its own, solving the puzzle individually and invisibly.
The novel ends before the anticipated action, before the inevitable bursting point of the unnamed narrator’s brooding and anger. In this way, Ellison the fiction writer finds a way to defeat the expectations of the novel-reader. Even those versed in the avant-garde attempts of the early twentieth century, are left expectant due to the power of the conventional content against which Ellison writes his book. The novel ends, but the story is not concluded, the battle not resolved. Just as jazz music fails to follow standardized Romantic form, Ellison’s novel fails to follow faithfully the traditional Aristotelic pattern of exposition, rising conflict, climax and denouement/resolution.
So, how is the novel structured, and how does Ellison lead us to the silent end, and why does it work? To answer this we must begin with a quick look at the context. The novel, written in the 1950’s, is set in the 1930’s, the big-band jazz era. Ellison was trained as a trumpet player in this decade, and the link to music in Invisible Man cannot be ignored. Ellison’s novel — as Written Jazz music — deliberately does not follow the patterns of classical form (in some respects). What is written is not what is heard. The sheet-music is a mere guide to performance.
Music in the novel is an ever-present force, coloring–with nostalgia, revulsion, or absorption–the narrator’s reactions to events; the novel is densely packed with references to bits of old blues, snatches of children’s rhymes, and jazz, in...
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