The Invisible Man vs Invisible Man: A Faux Pas

So I’m in my final year of University, and I’m doing my last ever literature module on Civil Rights Literature of the 20^th Century. I’m loving it. 

The texts are diverse and excellent. We are following a fantastic documentary about the Civil Rights movement, and the texts relate to this documentary. We also spend a significant amount of time each seminar talking about the state of the current world (Donald Trump’s disastrous administration in particular) and drawing similarities.

So it’s a great last module to be taking at the end of University.

It’s also the first module in which I made the biggest faux pas of my University experience.

I got the books weeks in advance and felt pretty proud of myself that I’d been so organised. It was the fourth week in and this week we had to read The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells. 

Or so I thought.

You’d think I would have noticed half way through reading, that perhaps this was the wrong book. That a science fiction novel set in an English village about a man that literally turns himself invisible was not on the reading list for my US Civil Rights class.

You’d think.

I spent the entire week drawing tenuous links between this man that turns himself invisible and runs around tormenting everyone he sees and the civil rights movement. Maybe the tormenting was a reference to the treatment of black people from the white majority? Being an English student, I went to town drawing links I would later discover DO NOT EXIST.

It turns out, Ralph Ellison’s invisible man is directly related to the civil rights, with the nameless black narrator feeling invisible in a white world.

Read your reading lists properly folks.