The Narrator/Narratee Relationship in Invisible Man

Critics have not failed to note importance of final address of Ralph Ellison's invisible man to reader, Who knows but that, on lower frequencies, I speak for you? In Democracy and Pursuit of Narrative, John F Callahan writes that question is rhetorical in profound sense of what is possible between writer and reader and-to take up essential allusions to Louis Armstrong's blues version of rhetorical question 'What did I do to be so black and blue?'-between performer and audience.l Robert Bataille claims that the hero-narrator finally becomes our exhorter and what he wishes to exhort us to is to accept truth of his fiction, to dwell on his metaphor and to make leap of faith and imagination that will enable us to perceive how another's experience is after all similar to our own.2 In Ellison and Ellison: The Solipsism of Invisible Timothy Brennan convincingly argues that the novel's closing words raise in full force problem of whom work is addressed to.3 There is also a spate of critical articles taking up narrator's attempt at establishing contact and identification with reader, in order to create consensus, through implicit similarity contained in echo of Baudelaire's Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere. Matters may be more complicated than they appear, especially regarding implied identity of that certainly hypocritical reader, and it may prove rewarding at this stage to pursue our inquiry via a close examination of narratee. Indeed, any narrative presupposes not only a narrator, who is different from author and writer, but a narratee who, in same fashion, is a fictional construct and should not be confused with actual reader, although he may closely resemble him. In certain novels, it is difficult to characterize narratee because narrator does not direct his narration explicitly towards anyone-he may be his own narratee in a sort of soliloquy-or because narrator himself is so little defined as to render analysis of enunciation unreliable.4 In case of a confessional novel like Invisible Man, whose intradiegetic first-person narrator is also major protagonist, it is easy to identify narratee, whose role is more significant than it might seem at first. Had novel merely consisted of story, told over twenty-five chapters framed within Prologue and Epilogue, no reader might have been referred to explicitly. Here, although narratee is not represented as a character or even as one who knows some of incidents recounted, he is expected to do two important things: to decipher and interpret correctly a large number of cultural references and also to react to narrator's call in frame in

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• Ralph Ellison, Intertextuality, and Biographical Criticism

  Barbara Foley•Journal of Narrative Theory•2004

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