Narrative, Power Politics, and the Emergence of the Black Mass Sphere in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

protagonist‟s geographical and psychological journey to fulfill a desire to become a Black leader and his ultimate failure to do so. Because of his oratory talent, the protagonist gains the opportunity to become a Black leader; in the end, however, he discovers his own invisibility in American society. Secluding himself in the underground, the protagonist narrates how he became aware of his “invisibility. ” In his introduction to the 1981 edition, Ellison described the protagonist as a “blues-toned laughter-at-wounds who included himself in his indictment of the human condition ” (xviii). The protagonist is placed in a conflicting zone between the spheres of Black leadership and the Black masses. In Invisible Man, Black leadership connotes two aspects: politics and ideologies. The politics of Black leadership is encapsulated in the character of Dr. Bledsoe, the president of the fictitious Black college. Since Reconstruction, the training of Black elites had been “based on the model of privileged, White educational institutions ” (James, 16), which denied the world of the Black masses. Southern racial politics in Black higher education takes the form of Dr. Bledsoe‟s unconditional compliance with White influential figures, which leads to his merciless expulsion of the protagonist because he “ruins ” the racial image by showing the White director, Mr. Norton, the world of uneducated local Blacks. Like its politics, the ideologies of Black leadership are incompatible with the interests of the Black masses. As a writer, Ellison refused to write propaganda since he was convinced that no specific ideology could “explore the full range of American Negro humanity ” and “affirm those qualities which are of value beyond any question of segregation, economics or previous condition of servitude ” (Shadow and Act, 17). In Invisible Man, the Brotherhood measures Blacks ‟ lives with its specific social science, which coincides with Marxism and denies the diversity of Black lives