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Ralph Ellison as a Reader of Hegel: Ellison’s Invisible Man as Literary Phenomenology

There has been little scholarship connecting Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit despite biographical information that Hegel influenced Ellison. Lawrence Jackson acknowledges, for example, that Ellison wrote to Richard Wright in 1940 searching for Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind (229). John Wright argues that Ellison agrees with the Hegelian notions that “consciousness is all,” “human life is a move toward the rational,” and freedom is a byproduct of consciousness, not political projects in the name of abstract ideas (69). Arnold Rampersad discusses how Ellison viewed Bigger Thomas’s consciousness as an “indignant consciousness,” which is a clear appropriation of Hegelian thought (132).1 Rampersad further shows how Ellison in “A Congress Jim Crow Didn’t Attend,” a piece of propaganda written for New Masses, drew on Hegel when he wrote the delegates at the third convention of National Negro Congress possessed “a temper of militant indignation” (134). These insights into Ellison’s use of Hegel are without a doubt valuable. Such biographical facts highlight the need for a discussion of how Ellison utilized and critiqued aspects of Hegelian phenomenology in Invisible Man.2 Invisible Man is laden with philosophical references to Emerson, Kierkegaard, and Hegel at the very least.3 Thus, I argue Ellison’s Invisible Man can be read as a sustained and profound meditation on African American consciousness that draws on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. This article will explore how Invisible Man seeks to investigate black existence and consciousness as it is shaped by anti-black racism from a Hegelian perspective. I argue that the philosophical dimensions of Invisible Man can be read side-by-side Hegel, so