Race, Blindness, and Monstrosity in The Invisible Man I would like to read Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man as the odyssey of one man's search for identity. Try this scenario: the narrator is briefly an academic, then a worker, and then a socialist politician. None of these "careers" work for him. Yet the narrator's time with the so-called Brotherhood, the socialist group that recruits him, comprises much of the novel. The narrator thinks he has found himself through the Brotherhood. He is the new Booker T. Washington and the new voice of his people. The work he is doing will finally earn him acceptance. He's at home. It's a nice scenario, but the narrator realizes that his journey must continue when Jack, the leader of the Brotherhood: "Now look here," he began, jumping up to lean on the table, and I half-turned the chair was spinning on its hind legs as he placed himself between me and the light, clutching the edge of the table, spluttering and falling into a foreign language, choking and coughing and shaking his head as I balanced on the balls of my feet, ready to push forward; seeing him above me and the others behind him, suddenly something seemed to explode from his face. . ." (Ellison, The Invisible Man, 409). The attentive bureaucracy gives way to anger; he regresses, spitting and cursing in a foreign language, leaning forward as if to attack the narrator. And the eruption? Jack is a Cyclops, that mythological Giant of terror and lawlessness: I stared into his face, feeling a sense of indignation. His left eye had collapsed, a line of bright red showing where the eyelid refused to close, and the. his gaze had lost control from his face to the glass, thinking that he is insignificant... middle of paper... Citizen is a rowdy drunk who no one listens to and yet Jack is a brother, or, as the Invisible Man says, the great white father. He is not such an easy enemy to defeat, and the problem will not disappear. The map of racism, blindness and monstrosity that Ellison draws is incomplete because the monster is never defeated. Perhaps this is also characteristic of the evolved Ellison's American Cyclops resists. He has become resistant to the hero's tricks and, although blind, will thrive. Ellison's Odysseus is destined to wander for more than eleven years.[1] This is the Gaelic word for "nonsense". Works Cited Ellison, Ralph. The invisible man. New York: Random House, New American Library, 1952. Homer. The Odyssey, translated by Richmond Lattimore. New York: Harper Collins, 1991. Joyce, James. Ulysses. New York: Random House, 1990.