On Reading Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright

Few incursions into literature have been as profitable as my recent decision to read both Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Richard Wright's Native Son. Even more fortuitous was my random decision regarding the order in which to read these two works. I say this because reading anything immediately after Native Son may prove anti-climactic given the richness of Wright's work.

Invisible Man had been lingering unread within my personal library for far too long. Because of the book's virtues, which have been extolled by Harold Bloom, America's foremost literary critic, my neglect of Invisible Man became a mounting source of shame. While it is commonplace to compare the two novels owing to the prominence they attained for their gifted writers, both black men who had witnessed firsthand the cruelty inflicted upon their race by not only the ruling class, but also by the subordinated Whites, the two works are vastly different.

Ralph Ellison

Richard Wright (1908-1960), in his brief life, knew deprivation on a level going beyond that endured by even the fatherless Ellison (1914-1994). Whereas Ellison was the recipient of a formal education at Tuskegee Institute, Wright saw his scholarship truncated in late childhood. Both men were lured to the North owing to a somewhat less hostile social climate and greater economic opportunities for blacks. Wright, like the protagonist he would later create, came into adulthood in Chicago. Ellison established himself within the Bohemian enclaves of New York. Both cities would serve prominently in their respective works.

Richard Wright

Invisible Man is the chronicle of a person who has been cast out of greater society through both self exile and the roles imposed by the dominant class on members of his race. Utilized cynically by the far left in his adopted city, the narrator develops a growing mistrust that pits him at odds with both white and black society. The sense of betrayal urges him into isolation; however, he also gives indications that the retreat will be temporary and that re-integration will take place and that his struggle will resume. No such optimism permeates the pages of Native Son. Native Son is the chronicle of what transpires when accumulated rage is both sublimated and expended. Everyone in the chronicle of Bigger Thomas is a victim, and no one emerges unscathed. The darkness of the work is partly what it makes it so compelling.

Both men paint a vivid landscape of America in the time before the Civil Rights' Era. The representations are both masterly, but the grim spectre of Bigger Thomas and his fate overshadows even the superlative prose of Ellison. Both novels serve as a fine starting point from which to explore African-American literature.