Rhetorical Oratory And Democracy In John Ellison's Invisible Man

Ever since Invisible Man was published in 1952, readers and scholars have recognized its many oratorical components and also its interest in democracy. What we so far have missed, however, is the fact that what brings oratory and democracy together in the novel is the narrator’s relentless testing of rhetorical ethos and consubstantiality. In the novel’s inner frame, this testing takes place through embodied speeches that the narrator delivers to sizable audiences; in the outer frame, the testing occurs in the invisible man’s complete narrative address to his readers. Ellison was quite conscious of his narrator’s role as both speaker and author, noting in later essays and lectures that the young man undergoes “a transformation from ranter …show more content…
Among the rhetoricians the narrator encounters in the portion of his life that he recounts to his readers are: the poor, incestuous “sharecropper who had brought disgrace upon the black community,” Jim Trueblood; the impassioned blind Chicagoan Reverend Homer A. Barbee; the militant black nationalist Ras the Exhorter; and the whole network of seemingly communistic “Brotherhood” members (Invisible Man 46). He also recalls important orators of the past: Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, and “the Founder” of the black college in the South that the narrator attends until its current president surreptitiously expels him. That all of these rhetoricians, like the orator-narrator himself, are men signals a potentially compulsory masculinity to the art of rhetoric that Invisible Man envisions. I discuss this problem below—but for now, suffice it to say that the narrator lives in a world full of fervent speechmaking, a network in which he has long aspired to (and ultimately does) participate. As Ellison explained in a 1955 interview, recalling Joyce’s Künstlerroman, Invisible Man “is the portrait of the artist as a rabble-rouser” (“Art of Fiction” …show more content…
Alluding to his act of placing black ink on a white page (and of bringing together differently racialized groups), the narrator asks: “Could this compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white be thus an urge to make music of invisibility? But I am an orator, a rabble rouser—Am? I was, and perhaps shall be again. Who knows? All sickness is not unto death, neither is invisibility” (IM 13–14, italics original). We are not sure at this point whether the narrator’s oratorical acts are ongoing or merely a thing of the past. Because he is currently hibernating underground, mooching off of Monopolated Light and Power beneath the streets of Harlem, he cannot address in the flesh a live audience. While his definition of “invisibility” is much more complex than simply the connotation of remaining physically unseen by other human beings, the narrator still draws a correlation between visibility and oratory, implying that he can take up the latter once again only after he resurfaces at street level. The act of writing, on the other hand, can happen underground, making “music of invisibility” for audiences to hear (or, eventually, read), if not see. It is the visual—as well as the simultaneously dialogic, or call-and-response—element of the kind of oratory Ellison’s narrator