![]() ![]() ![]() The opening lines of the novel help us to understand how this motif operates: The body is written about the past, while the prologue-epilogue is written about the present and just enough is introduced in the prologue to the foreshadow the realizations that come to fore in the epilogue.Īccording to the prologue, the visual code that renders race visible to others renders the narrator’s humanity invisible. The body documents what leads the narrator to the city’s underground, while the prologue and epilogue record his reflections from within the underground. It is apparent that the two sections of the book are written as one and are later divided to bracket the body of the text. The clearest set of design principles is offered by the narrator in the paired prologue-epilogue of the text. By studying the nature of the narrator’s retreat, the possibility of an ethical position emerges for the architect-planner that assists him or her in locating the noumena of race in the inherited material of the postwar city. In order to fully exploit this motif, one must push beyond imitating its form–in textual or architectural terms–to elucidate its underlying ethic. This essay outlines some of the architectural applications of Ellison’s motif, as well as introduces an urban design principle implicit in the narrator’s final retreat to the city’s underground. Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man introduces the motif of invisibility to create a connection between the social construction of race and the building fabric of the postwar city. This essay originally appeared in VIA, an academic journal sponsored by the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Such activities greatly reduce the potential of exacerbating existing patterns of exclusion or introducing new patterns of segregation. This act of unveiling is an pre-formal mode of investigation that must serve as a prelude to any and all formal interventions. The main protagonist’s curse of invisibility and his eventual retreat to the sewers –the literal ‘underground’ of the city–is interpreted as a prompt for unveiling the forces that silently direct a city’s visible geometry. ![]() The author claims that invisibility serves as an allegory for the act of uncovering the political motivations of urban spaces. By Charles Davis | This essay examines the rhetorical function of invisibility in Ralph Ellison’s postwar novel Invisible Man. ![]()
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