An Introduction to Invisibility

I. Introduction

In 1953, Ralph Ellison published Invisible Man, racializing the discourse of literary invisibility by centering his novel on a man invisible explicitly due to his being African-American. Some critics, from Vogue to Tina Chen, believe that the novels of Chang-rae Lee follow directly in Ellison’s footsteps by representing the Korean-American male as an invisible man. Yet, Henry Park, the protagonist of Lee’s Native Speaker, is not wholly invisible, nor does his camouflage explicitly come from his ethnicity. He is a spy that, as the narrator sometimes suggests, is helped in his job due to his Korean-American heritage. The racialization of the discourse of invisibility does more than merely displace the real causes of that invisibility. It implies that invisibility is limited to racial minorities when this is not the case. Paul Auster’s City of Glass, part of The New York Trilogy, may offer a solution to Lee’s inability to resolve the ontological problems his novel raises. By avoiding the racialization of social invisibility altogether, Auster focuses his text on its ontological roots and emphasizes its implications. Whereas Lee’s Native Speaker distorts the meaning of his novel by hinting at racial, and racist, causes of invisibility, yet still links the invisibility to language, Auster avoids racial issues and emphasizes the ontological roots of invisibility and has a greater capacity to explain the emotional issues at stake.