The Pivotal Moments in Ralph Ellison's Novel Invisible Man

Most of us tend to make decisions in our lives that can shape a significant portion of our futures, and there are many literary exemplars that showcase this effect on a character. A common trait of these works is the inclusion of a pivotal moment: a moment where the decision takes place, where the character changes their life.

In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, there are many situations or decisions that can be seen as the pivotal moment of the novel, but what contributed the most to changing the narrator’s life was his decision to join the Brotherhood as one of their speakers.

The narrator joins the Brotherhood in the hopes that he will be able to spread his beliefs, but ends up in a situation where he, again, has no say in what happens around him, therefore reinforcing the author’s theme of invisibility.

Joining the brotherhood, for the narrator, was a pivotal choice for both good and bad reasons.

One of the benefits of joining this civil rights group was that it gave the narrator a steady platform where he believes he can voice his mind; he was a representative of the Brotherhood, a group respected by many, so he did not have to struggle in gaining an audience.

The narrator being able to speak his mind as a speaker for a generally respected community like the Brotherhood, although the antithesis of being invisible, sticks to the author’s goal of keeping the narrator identity-less because he was not speaking as himself.

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He stood in front of a crowd as a speaker for a larger group; he had lost his individuality.

Although the narrator believed he had gained a footing in the community by speaking his beliefs, it was not long before he realized that this was not the case. The freedom he thought he had was nonexistent: the Brotherhood wanted him to speak “scientifically”, to speak not from his mind but as he was told to speak. He did not immediately realize that he was stuck in the exact same situation he had been in his entire life, but the narrator was falling backward in society instead of propelling forward.

This contributes to the author’s idea of invisibility because the narrator is treated as if his ideas and opinions do not matter. This reinforces the white superiority mentality of that time, given that the white brothers of the Brotherhood were the ones giving the orders, washing out the ideas of the blacks and therefore making them “invisible”.

While the narrator chooses to remain invisible throughout his time spent in New York, it is often not his choice. Although visible as a public figure, he is invisible because he is speaking ideas that are not his. Given that he is part of a whole, he also loses his individuality, meaning that, to the leaders of the Brotherhood, he wasn’t exactly unique.

For the narrator, joining the Brotherhood was a pivotal moment in both positive and negative ways; he has a voice in society but a voice that is artificial because in this situation the white man still controls the black man but now calls it unity. The author has portrayed the narrator in this way to emphasize the invisibility of blacks as a part of American society, which is something that still holds its relevance today, and how something that should be a resemblance of unity can still resemble captivity.