"Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Ralph)

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
"You are saved," cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; "you are saved: what has
cast such a shadow upon you?"
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

HARRY: I tell you, it is not me you are looking at,
Not me you are grinning at, not me your confidential looks
Incriminate, but that other person, if person,
You thought I was: let your necrophily
Feed upon that carcase. . .
T. S. Eliot, Family Reunion




Prologue

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 glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings,
themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.
Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a bio-chemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility
to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in
contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their
physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous
to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. Then too, you're constantly being
bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often 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. It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin
to bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. You ache with the need
to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish,
and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, alas, it's
seldom successful.
One night I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps because of the near darkness he saw
me and called me an insulting name. I sprang at him, seized his coat lapels and demanded that he
apologize. He was a tall blond man, and as my face came close to his he looked insolently out of his blue
eyes and cursed me, his breath hot in my face as he struggled. I pulled his chin down sharp upon the
crown of my head, butting him as I had seen the West Indians do, and I felt his flesh tear and the blood
gush out, and I yelled, "Apologize! Apologize!" But he continued to curse and struggle, and I butted him
again and again until he went down heavily, on his knees, profusely bleeding. I kicked him repeatedly, in
a frenzy because he still uttered insults though his lips were frothy with blood. Oh yes, I kicked him! And
in my outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat, right there beneath the lamplight in the
deserted street, holding him by the collar with one hand, and opening the knife with my teeth -- when it
occurred to me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far as he knew, was in the midst of a
walking nightmare! And I stopped the blade, slicing the air as I pushed him away, letting him fall back to
the street. I stared at him hard as the lights of a car stabbed through the darkness. He lay there, moaning
on the asphalt; a man almost killed by a phantom. It unnerved me. I was both disgusted and ashamed. I