In a postmodern world, there is no American Dream.
Postmodernists typically reject any grand explanatory theories of the world. Nothing holds grand symbolic meaning and no one can be saved by God or reason or self or reality or art. While all previous eras found something around which to unite, postmodernists reject the very notion that any one person can truly connect with another — we are all just wandering the world, giving our own individual meanings to our own individual sights.
Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man is, perhaps, the ultimate postmodern novel.
Harlem
After getting expelled from his southern college, Invisible Man moves north to Harlem. Initially, he hopes to find a summer job so that he can afford his fall tuition. However, as is the postmodern fashion, he realizes that the structure he thought served to protect him did not, in fact, exist: his headmaster never intended for him to return to school in the summer, instead keeping him running after a dream that was never his in the first place.
Tuskegee
While the college Invisible Man attended is never specified, Ellison himself attended the Tuskegee Institute. What’s more, the statue of the Founder he describes in detail in chapter 2 is on Tuskegee’s campus.
The narrator arrives in Harlem via George Washington Bridge
Greenwood
During the battle royal scene, it is hinted that Greenwood is the narrator’s hometown. Also, later in the novel, he mentions being from South Carolina as he embraces his childhood while eating yams on NYC streets.
Ellison structures the novel around his main character’s realization of postmodern ideals. The protagonist, a young black man, never gives his name: for the entire duration of the novel, he is the “Invisible Man” (IM) and the novel reflects his journey to recognizing himself within that identity.
He begins as a young scholar full of hope, attending college and aspiring for success. What he doesn’t know at the time, however, is that the to which he aspires does not exist. IM naively wants the unlimited American Dream when all that traditional society makes available to him is the “cast down your bucket where you stand,” oppressive American Dream. Throughout the novel, IM searches for structure after structure. Each structure, though, be it scholarship, communism, factory work, etc., fails him equally. Each time, he realizes that they are all iterations, more or less, of the same explanatory structures that will never really be able to explain anything. And he remains invisible throughout them all.
Finally, in the end, he realizes that each dream he chased never existed for him in the first place. He recognizes the nature of his invisibility and that the American Dream is but a construct designed to “keep…[him]…running” (Ellison 33) in a direction that will never lead anywhere. Only by literally going underground and surrounding himself with light does he begin to subvert the narrative that he must explain his life in relation to others or live up to some ideal that is empty, anyway.
By embracing himself as invisible, our postmodern protagonist can finally know himself. Because he rejects all “explanatory” structures, he is in touch with all the unique symbols he constructs for himself instead of sticking on grasping at what symbols might connect him to others. Finally, he realizes the very postmodern idea that “all life seen from the hole of invisibility is absurd” (Ellison 579). Thus, Invisible Man concludes with the notion that there is no realization of the American Dream. It was illusion all along.
“Step outside the narrow borders of what men call reality and you step into chaos…”