In the South everyone knew you, but coming North was a jump into the unknown. How many days could you walk the streets of the big city without encountering anyone who knew you, and how many nights? You could actually make yourself anew. The notion was frightening, for now the world seemed to flow before my eyes. All boundaries down, freedom was not only the recognition of necessity, it was the recognition of possibility.

Ralph Ellison’s monumental novel Invisible Man is a picaresque coming-of-age story. Our unnamed narrator grows up in the American South between the World Wars. After a series of incidents gets him a scholarship to—and then expelled from—college, he travels to New York City. There, in the bustling, anonymous city, he realizes he has been invisible all along—which is to say, that no one seems to be able to see him for him. Suzanne and Chris explore this powerfully written book, and how sight, sound, and taste can connect its narrator, even as the city isolates him.

SHOW NOTES.

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man. [Bookshop.]

Also by Ralph Ellison: Juneteenth; Essays (Includes “Living with Music”).

Our episodes on: Gertrude Stein, Dante’s Inferno, Moby-Dick, Ernest Hemingway, the Decameron, The Book of the City of Ladies, and The Jungle.

Voltaire: Candide.

Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project.

China Miéville: The City and the City.

Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities.

Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities.

Next: Louise Fitzhugh: Harriet the Spy. [Bookshop.]

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