---
product_id: 50422960
title: "Invisible Man (Penguin Modern Classics)"
price: "€ 27.87"
currency: EUR
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 13
url: https://www.desertcart.fr/products/50422960-invisible-man-penguin-modern-classics
store_origin: FR
region: France
---

# Invisible Man (Penguin Modern Classics)

**Price:** € 27.87
**Availability:** ✅ In Stock

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- **What is this?** Invisible Man (Penguin Modern Classics)
- **How much does it cost?** € 27.87 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
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## Description

Buy Invisible Man (Penguin Modern Classics) 1 by Ellison, Ralph, Callahan, John (ISBN: 9780141184425) from desertcart's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

Review: Black humour - This belongs up there with Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes and yes Chaucer. It is an absolute romp through black America, as if someone had asked the author to tell them about what it meant to be black and he'd said to them and to himself "I'LL show you...' And in the showing there is a great reserve of humour though as with The Sellout one could never be sure of the intention of humour, as though it were an unconscious product of the skin colour interface. Yet in the end it is common humanity in an existential quandary that comes to the fore, or rather takes a back seat. On the way we are treated to various religious, political and downright tragic scenarios and strategies for each of which the orator in Ellison has a rip roaring speech. Great stuff!
Review: A Literary Dream - Invisible Man is Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel about a young black man, who gets thrown out of university for accidentally offending a wealthy patron. He then tries to make a life for himself in New York. This is a literary novel, and I sometimes found it irritating that symbolism seemed more important than a sense of reality. However, a few lines early on in the book sum up how I’ve come to feel about Invisible Man: “People talk of metaphorical significance of this or that scene. Seems like a puzzle or a children’s game. But a dream sometimes tells us things in the shape of metaphor, and this is no children’s game. This is real and serious.” When I wake up from a dream, I do not review it for realism, and give it a low star rating if the content of the dream has been one of personal symbolism rather than a realistic story. People who have studied dreams - Carl Jung for example - emphasise their strange, metaphorical nature. Dreams deal in the pictorial and the figurative. They reach into areas of taboo, with which the waking mind does not feel comfortable. Invisible Man often inhabits this sort of realm. A number of scenes have the dreamy power of exploring taboo – the famous one at the beginning of the book involving a sharecropper’s family, for example. There’s another telling passage towards the end, where a woman shares with the unnamed narrator a fantasy that she could not think of sharing with anyone in the normal run of life. Then almost as the book closes, the narrator actually has a dream that reproduces images from his waking life. The images are wild and chaotic, but strangely are not clearly the result of a dream until the narrator wakes up. So that’s how I see the book, as a kind of literary dream reaching into all the dark areas of life that waking minds would rather leave alone. I don’t think it always works. Sometimes the novel seems disjointed because it is disjointed, and not because it is reproducing the fragmented nature of a dream. Nevertheless, the book is remarkable, perhaps more in the thinking about it afterwards rather than in the reading of it. Dreams themselves are rather like that. I would give Invisible Man a three for the experience of reading the book, five for the thinking about it afterwards.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | 15,132 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) 282 in Fiction Classics (Books) 1,379 in Literary Fiction (Books) 2,495 in Contemporary Fiction (Books) |
| Customer reviews | 4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars (8,110) |
| Dimensions  | 12.9 x 2.5 x 19.8 cm |
| Edition  | 1st |
| ISBN-10  | 0141184426 |
| ISBN-13  | 978-0141184425 |
| Item weight  | 416 g |
| Language  | English |
| Part of series  | Modern Library 100 Best Novels |
| Print length  | 608 pages |
| Publication date  | 2 Aug. 2001 |
| Publisher  | Penguin Classics |

## Images

![Invisible Man (Penguin Modern Classics) - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91hKkCUkFFL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Black humour
*by K***R on 5 October 2018*

This belongs up there with Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes and yes Chaucer. It is an absolute romp through black America, as if someone had asked the author to tell them about what it meant to be black and he'd said to them and to himself "I'LL show you...' And in the showing there is a great reserve of humour though as with The Sellout one could never be sure of the intention of humour, as though it were an unconscious product of the skin colour interface. Yet in the end it is common humanity in an existential quandary that comes to the fore, or rather takes a back seat. On the way we are treated to various religious, political and downright tragic scenarios and strategies for each of which the orator in Ellison has a rip roaring speech. Great stuff!

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ A Literary Dream
*by M***S on 21 January 2018*

Invisible Man is Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel about a young black man, who gets thrown out of university for accidentally offending a wealthy patron. He then tries to make a life for himself in New York. This is a literary novel, and I sometimes found it irritating that symbolism seemed more important than a sense of reality. However, a few lines early on in the book sum up how I’ve come to feel about Invisible Man: “People talk of metaphorical significance of this or that scene. Seems like a puzzle or a children’s game. But a dream sometimes tells us things in the shape of metaphor, and this is no children’s game. This is real and serious.” When I wake up from a dream, I do not review it for realism, and give it a low star rating if the content of the dream has been one of personal symbolism rather than a realistic story. People who have studied dreams - Carl Jung for example - emphasise their strange, metaphorical nature. Dreams deal in the pictorial and the figurative. They reach into areas of taboo, with which the waking mind does not feel comfortable. Invisible Man often inhabits this sort of realm. A number of scenes have the dreamy power of exploring taboo – the famous one at the beginning of the book involving a sharecropper’s family, for example. There’s another telling passage towards the end, where a woman shares with the unnamed narrator a fantasy that she could not think of sharing with anyone in the normal run of life. Then almost as the book closes, the narrator actually has a dream that reproduces images from his waking life. The images are wild and chaotic, but strangely are not clearly the result of a dream until the narrator wakes up. So that’s how I see the book, as a kind of literary dream reaching into all the dark areas of life that waking minds would rather leave alone. I don’t think it always works. Sometimes the novel seems disjointed because it is disjointed, and not because it is reproducing the fragmented nature of a dream. Nevertheless, the book is remarkable, perhaps more in the thinking about it afterwards rather than in the reading of it. Dreams themselves are rather like that. I would give Invisible Man a three for the experience of reading the book, five for the thinking about it afterwards.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Good Condition
*by I***A on 21 June 2024*

The book arrived and I have no issues - lovely quality and great value too.

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*Product available on Desertcart France*
*Store origin: FR*
*Last updated: 2026-03-08*