Teaching Invisible Man

TEACHING INVISIBLE MAN: Miscellaneous

Invisible Man -- "the most distinguished single work" published in America since 1945, according to a 1964 survey of 200 American literary critics.

MISCELLANEOUS SUGGESTIONS FOR TEACHING:

It's a novel that takes a long time to read. It's possible to vary discussion with some of the topics below -- depending on what your students have read before:

Baby Suggs's sermon from Beloved - "love your flesh" - on the Toni Morrison video, or photocopied on one sheet.
A Langston Hughes Blues poem -- discuss (there is a recording, in Hughes' voice, to Blues music).
Have students take sides in the debate about what makes African American literature great, based on this novel.
Take sides in the Brustein-Wilson debate on African American theater, using this novel to support positions.
Distribute this quotation from W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and ask students whether the "double-consciousness" DuBois refers to is reflected in the novel. Ask whether it's strictly an African-American phenomenon, or whether this double-consciousness is present in another way for non-Blacks. (I tell students, in the case of African Americans, this double-consciousness is loaded on top of race prejudice and so it raises the ante for Blacks; much more is at stake, for Blacks, in this phenomenon).

[T]his American world ... yields [the Negro] no true self-awareness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other [white American] world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others; of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One always feels a two-ness &emdash; an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife -- this longing to attain self-aware manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world...
'This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.

--from The Souls of Black Folk, Ch. 1)

Impromptu in-class performances of parts of the book -- it is easily adaptable to a Readers' Theater approach (see Invisible Man - Impromptu Performances).
Remind students of their 10th-grade Hurson/Harlem Renaissance unit, and ask them to make connections:

Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God: how does this novel compare to Invisible Man?
Was Hurston's novel a separatist or protest novel? or a broadly "American" novel like Ellison's?
Remember the post-WWI experience of blacks in America? Compare insane veterans at the Golden Day. Is their culture insane?
The IM becomes one of those who made the Great Migration. Comment?
Harlem in the 1920s and 30s -- this is when the IM is in Harlem. What do you remember from the HR that compares w/ Harlem in Ellison?
How does Marcus Garvey compare with Ras the Exhorter in IM?
Other material from their Harlem Renaissance projects.

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