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56b8b58
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What a group of people we were, I thought. Why, you could cause us the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us with something we liked.
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Ralph Ellison |
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d2887f9
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Those two spots are among the darkest of our whole civilization--pardon me, our whole culture (an important distinction, I've heard)--which might sound like a hoax, or a contradiction, but that (by contradiction, I mean) is how the world moves: not like an arrow, but a boomerang. (Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy.)
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Ralph Ellison |
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d7be0d7
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Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the scorecard of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less--a black amorphous thing. And you, for all your power, are not a man to him, but a God, a force--
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Ralph Ellison |
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2a5f82c
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Above the decorous walking around me, sounds of footsteps leaving the verandas of far-flung buildings and moving toward the walks and over the walks to the asphalt drives lined with whitewashed stones, those cryptic messages for men and women, boys and girls heading quietly toward where the visitors waited, and we moving not in the mood of worship but of judgement; as though even here in the filtering dusk, here beneath the deep indigo sky,..
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Ralph Ellison |
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5ef7524
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I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting g..
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civil-rights-movement
invisible-man
literature
ralph-ellison
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Ralph Ellison |
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3cc1806
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Now, aware of my invisibility, I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century, which I discovered when I was trying to escape in the night from Ras the Destroyer. But that's getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
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Ralph Ellison |
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f0e12e2
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Dr. Gordon S. Seagrave, the famous "Burma Surgeon."
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Ralph Ellison |
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075852d
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They were very much the same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me.
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Ralph Ellison |
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64e2086
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while fiction is but a form of symbolic action, a mere game of "as if," therein lies its true function and its potential for effecting change."
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Ralph Ellison |
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e982c0e
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My emotions locked, as I saw her lipstick lying on the table and grabbed it, saying, "Yes, yes," as I bent to write furiously across her belly in drunken inspiration: SYBIL, YOU WERE RAPED BY SANTA CLAUS SURPRISE and paused there; trembling above her, my knees on the bed as she waited with unsteady expectancy. It was purplish metallic shade of lipstick, and as she panted with anticipation the letters stretched and quivered, up hill and down..
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Ralph Ellison |
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9856c32
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Dammit, white folk are always giving orders, it's a habit with them. Why didn't you make an excuse? You're black and living in the South-- did you forget how to lie?
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Ralph Ellison |
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841aca3
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The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.
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communication
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Ralph Ellison |
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0715c90
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No indeed, the world is just as concrete, ornery, vile and sublimely wonderful as before, only now I better understand my relation to it and it to me.
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Ralph Ellison |
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91c01e7
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Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states.
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Ralph Ellison |
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c5e6988
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On his deathbed he called my father to him and said, "Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you t..
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Ralph Ellison |
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b81ab1e
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America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain.
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Ralph Ellison |
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9ba7df5
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I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself.
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Ralph Ellison |
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f7d8ba6
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Well, you had better speak more slowly so we can understand. We mean to do right by you, but you've got to know your place at all times. All right, now, go on with your speech.
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Ralph Ellison |
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af0d98b
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But seriously, because you both fail to understand what is happening to you. You cannot see or hear or smell the truth of what you see -- and you, looking for destiny! It's classic! And the boy, this automaton, he was made of the very mud of the region and he sees far less than you. Poor stumblers, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the score-card of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less -- a b..
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Ralph Ellison |
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3a2d4af
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prepared to make the ultimate wartime sacrifice that most governments demand of their able-bodied citizens, but his was one that regarded his life as of lesser value than the lives of whites making the same sacrifice.
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Ralph Ellison |
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f0d397b
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How could you treat a Negro as equal in war and then deny him equality during times of
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Ralph Ellison |
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5104232
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Thus for one lone stretch of time I lived with the intensity displayed by those chronic numbers players who see clues to their fortune in the most minute and insignificant phenomena: in clouds, on passing trucks and subway cars, in dreams, comic strips, the shape of dog-luck fouled on the pavements. I was dominated by the all-embracing idea of Brotherhood. The organization had given the world a new shape, and me a vital role. We recognized ..
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Ralph Ellison |
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c186901
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The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited patiently for the other voices to speak.
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Ralph Ellison |
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c1ebed2
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Leaving him and going out into the paint-fuming air I had the feeling that I had been talking beyond myself, had used words and expressed attitudes not my own, that I was in the grip of some alien personality lodged deep within me. Like the servant about whom I'd read in psychology class who, during a trance, had recited pages of Greek philosophy which she had overheard one day while she worked. It was as though I were acting out a scene fr..
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Ralph Ellison |
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a24df61
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But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me?
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Ralph Ellison |
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cb64e46
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I could feel their eyes, saw them all and saw too the time when they would know that my prospects were ended and saw already the contempt they'd feel for me, a college man who had lost his prospects and pride. I could see it all and I knew that even the officials and the older men would despise me as though, somehow, in losing my place in Bledsoe's world I had betrayed them . . . I saw it as they looked at my overalls.
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Ralph Ellison |
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bcd411e
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With all your speechmaking and studying I thought you understood something. But you . . . All right, go ahead. See Norton. You'll find that he wants you disciplined; he might not know it, but he does. Because he knows that I know what is best for his interests. You're a black educated fool, son. These white folk have newspapers, magazines, radios, spokesmen to get their ideas across. If they want to tell the world a lie, they can tell it so..
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Ralph Ellison |
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724ba9f
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How had I come to this? I had kept unswervingly to the path placed before me, had tried to be exactly what I was expected to be, had done exactly what I was expected to do -- yet, instead of winning the expected reward, here I was stumbling along, holding on desperately to one of my eyes in order to keep from bursting out my brain against some familiar object swerved into my path by my distorted vision. And now to drive me wild I felt sudde..
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Ralph Ellison |
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265078e
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The streets were full of hurrying people who walked as though they had been wound up and were directed by some unseen control. Many of the men carried dispatch cases and brief cases and I gripped mine with a sense of importance. And here and there I saw Negroes who hurried along with leather pouches strapped to their wrists. They reminded me fleetingly of prisoners carrying their leg irons as they escaped from a chain gang. Yet they seemed ..
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Ralph Ellison |
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cf64910
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For the first time, as I swung along the streets, I thought consciously of how I had conducted myself at home. I hadn't worried too much about whites as people. Some were friendly and some were not, and you tried not to offend either. But here they all seemed impersonal; and yet when most impersonal they startled me by being polite, by begging my pardon after brushing against me in a crowd. Still I felt that even when they were polite they ..
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Ralph Ellison |
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38a03ed
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Nor could I see any reason for allowing our more chastened view of political possibility (not too long before I began this novel A. Phillip Randolph had to threaten our beloved F.D.R. with a march on Washington before our war industries were opened to Negroes) to impose undue restrictions upon my novelist's freedom to manipulate imaginatively those possibilities that existed both in Afro-American personality and in the restricted structure ..
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Ralph Ellison |
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f776010
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I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.
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existential
race
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Ralph Ellison |
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aa4b63a
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His name was Clifton and he was black and they shot him. Isn't that enough to tell? Isn't it all you need to know?
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Ralph Ellison |
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06920ab
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Running from the birds to what, I didn't know. I ran. Why was I here at all? I ran through the night, ran within myself. Ran.
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Ralph Ellison |
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3614748
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We shall demonstrate once again that in this great, inventive land man's idlest dreams are but the blueprints and mockups of emerging realities, technologies and poems. Here in the fashion of our pioneer forefathers, who confronted the mysteries of wilderness, mountain and prairie with crude tools and a self-generating imagination, we are committed to facing with courage the enormous task of imposing an ever more humane order upon this bewi..
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Ralph Ellison |
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31425fb
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To hell with being ashamed of what you liked.
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Ralph Ellison |
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690813a
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When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical.
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racism
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Ralph Ellison |
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c355b6b
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As the advertising industry, which is dedicated to the creation of masks, makes clear, that which cannot gain authority from tradition may borrow it with a mask.
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Ralph Ellison |
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a1ce01f
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It was unbelievably wild. Some continued to shout threats in their outrage and frustration, while others, both men and women, filled the air with a strangely brokenhearted and forlorn sound of weeping, and the officers found it difficult to disperse them. In fact, they continued to mill angrily about even as firemen in asbestos suits broke through, dragging hoses from a roaring pumper truck and spraying the flaming car with a foamy chemical..
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Ralph Ellison |
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33f7fae
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Then too, you're constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy.
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blind
invisible-black-men
invisible-man
racism-in-america
racists
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Ralph Ellison |
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f3eec9d
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When I was praised for my conduct I felt a guilt that in some way I was doing something that was really against the wishes of the white folks, that if they had understood they would have desired me to act just the opposite, that I should have been sulky and mean, and that that really would have been what they wanted, even though they were fooled and thought they wanted me to act as I did. It made me afraid that some day they would look upon..
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Ralph Ellison |
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8ca252a
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If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn't care as long as they sang without dissonance; yes, and avoided the uncertain extremes of the scale.
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Ralph Ellison |
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d068de7
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Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one's form is to live a death.
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Ralph Ellison |
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4e97581
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Here I had thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either color or men ... For all they were concerned, we were so many names scribbled on fake ballots, to be used at their convenience and when not needed to be filed away. It was a joke, an absurd joke.
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Ralph Ellison |