1. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
A little help getting started by your two favorite English teachers.

2. Point of View --Picaresque Novel
First Person Narration –(The narrator is an unnamed black man who writes the story as a memoir of his life.)
Naïve Narrator/Main Character
They are episodic in nature
Told in flashbacks (all but the prologue and epilogue are set in the past)
Main character/narrator is a sympathetic anti-hero
Main character/narrator’s experiences take him to many different locations and through several levels of society.
Due to main character/narrator’s naivety, social commentary is left to the reader’s inference.

3. The has nothing to do with getting ready for the Exam but…
OTHER PICARESQUE NOVELS YOU MIGHT ENJOY:
Cervante’s Don Quixote
Voltaire’s Candide
Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders
Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
William Makepeace Thackery’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn*
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
*Oh yeah, we read this one! 

4. Summary of the Story
major conflict · The narrator seeks to act according to the values and expectations of his immediate social group, but he finds himself continuously unable to reconcile his socially imposed role as a black man with his inner concept of identity, or even to understand his inner identity.
rising action · Dr. Bledsoe expels the narrator from college; the narrator gets into a fight over union politics with his black supervisor at the Liberty Paints plant and enters the plant hospital, where he experiences a kind of rebirth; the narrator stays with Mary, who fosters his sense of social responsibility; the narrator joins the Brotherhood.

5. Summary of the Story
climax · The narrator witnesses Clifton’s racially motivated murder at the hands of white police officers; unable to get in touch with the Brotherhood, he organizes Clifton’s funeral on his own initiative and rouses the black community’s anger against the state of race relations; the Brotherhood rebukes him for his act of independence.
falling action  · Riots break out in Harlem, releasing the pent-up anger that has gathered since Clifton’s funeral; the narrator encounters Ras, who calls for him to be lynched; running from Ras and the police, the narrator falls into a manhole and remains underground in “hibernation.”

6. Some of the Possible Themes
Identity
Lies and deceit
Ideology
Invisibility
Ambition
Love
Women and feminity
Power

7. The Characters Rinehart The Narrator Brother Hambro Dr. Bledsoe
Take a moment and identify each person and their part in the story.
Do you remember who each of these people are and what part they play in the story?
The Narrator
Dr. Bledsoe
Mr. Norton
Trueblood
Emerson
Mary Rambo
Brother Jack
Brother Tod Clifton
Ras the Exhorter
Sybil
Rev. Barbee

8. Quotes
“Our white is so white you can paint a chunka coal and you’d have to crack it open with a sledge hammer to prove it wasn’t white clear through.”

9. Why is this important?
Lucius Brockway makes this boast to the narrator in Ch 10. The narrator has taken a job at the Liberty Paints plant, and Brockway is describing the properties of the “Optic White” paint. This quote shows Ellison’s use of the Liberty Paints plant as a metaphor. In Ellison’s descriptions of the paint- mixing process and the relations between blacks and whites in the company, the Liberty Paints plant emerges as a symbol for the racial dynamics in American society. The main property of Optic White is its ability to cover up blackness; it can even whiten charcoal, which is often used to make black marks upon—to spoil, in a sense—white paper. This evokes the larger notion that the white power structure in America, like the white paint, tries to stifle black identity. Prejudice forces black people to assimilate to white culture, to mask their true thoughts and feelings to gain acceptance and tolerance.

10. Your Turn
Find a quote for each theme, symbol, or motif you have chosen. You should have at least three.
Explain why that quote works for the theme you have chosen it for. In other words, what does it mean?

11. Complete this Assignment
When you have finished do this same exercise for Hamlet, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frankenstein, The Scarlet Letter and at least one other novel or play you have read and studied in high school. You should have six novels or plays you are completely conversant in by May 10, the day of our AP Exam.