Prologue/Epilogue: The Ethical Reprieve of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

This essay examines the rhetorical function of invisibility in Ralph Ellison’s postwar novel Invisible Man. The author claims that invisibility serves as an allegory for the act of uncovering the political motivations of urban spaces. The main protagonist’s curse of invisibility and his eventual retreat to the sewers –the literal ‘underground’ of the city–is interpreted as a prompt for unveiling the forces that silently direct a city’s visible geometry. This act of unveiling is an pre-formal mode of investigation that must serve as a prelude to any and all formal interventions. Such activities greatly reduce the potential of exacerbating existing patterns of exclusion or introducing new patterns of segregation.

This essay originally appeared in VIA, an academic journal sponsored by the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.