Invisible Man Take Two

This is the second time I have read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. I read Invisible Man two years ago for my American Lit class in high school. While rereading the novel, I realized that I was looking at the novel in an entirely new way. Two years ago when I was reading, I was looking at literary elements and trying to remember important quotes so I could recognize them on the test. This time around, I actually was able to move beyond what I had learned in my lit class and really understand the novel. My lit class did help me a lot when I looked at the odd incidents in the novel, but in my lit class I never really understood the point of the novel. In that class, we looked at the novel in terms of race and it was fascinating (we also watched American History X and Crash). But for this class I found the novel much more interesting as portrait of identity. At the time race seemed to be the most important element to the novel, but in rereading it I discovered that it is about the narrator's identity or lack of for almost the entire novel. My blog post from this week talks about the narrator's invisibility in terms of his identity. The novel is so much more than a commentary on racism in America. It is about a search for identity in a crazy and pretty screwed up world.
This time around I realized that the novel actually connected with me. As a reread the last two pages, I found myself think about how universal Ellison's novel is. Anyone can be invisible and in the last page and a half Ellison sums up the entire novel and the meaning of invisibility. The last line of the novels says "Who knows but that,on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?". The first time around, this line made no sense to me, but this time it was as if I had an epiphany (almost as if I'd been hit on the head with a ton of bricks). I realized that Ellison is speaking for all those who are invisible. The novel is just not a semi-autobiographical account of a black man from the South living in Harlem; it is a description of the journey to identity and how you can be invisible. I realized that the narrator was speaking directly to me, not because I happened to be dealing with ethnic discrimination (as I was when I read the novel the first time), but because I understood the sense of invisibility that the narrator was experiencing because I too have felt and still sometimes feel invisible.