On Becoming Invisible

 I was immediately drawn into the world Ellison created for “Invisible Man.” Part of the power of this story seems to be its accessibility. The first paragraph is fascinating, it seems vague while at the same time setting up the story to come. Ellison writes, “It goes a long way back, some twenty years.” By starting off his story with “It goes” Ellison is causing us to ask the question “what goes?” and having to ask this question draws us in as readers. We want to know what goes way back, and the story has only just started.

He goes on to say, “All my life I had been looking for something and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was.” Ellison is still being vague, but he is giving us more details. We now know that the character has been looking for something all his life. We still don't know what it is, so that raises the question, “what is he looking for?” Only two sentences in and we're already full of questions. We don't know what he's looking for, and maybe he didn't really know either because everyone else was trying to tell him what he's looking for. In fact in the next sentence he tells us that he “accepted their answers, too, though they were often in contradiction wand even self-contradicting.” He was letting other people tell him what he was looking for, even though they didn't make sense with one another, and sometimes didn't even make sense with themselves. It seems almost like a kind of desperation. He was so eager to find something that he forgot to make sure the things that were offered to him made sense.

The paragraph ends with the idea that the whole time he was just trying to figure out who he really was, and what he found was that you can't ask others to define you, “I am nobody but myself,” he writes, “an invisible man!” The first paragraph seems to tell the whole story.