In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

70 The Visible Man Moving Beyond False Visibility in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins Novels —Kelly C. Connelly “Why not give them a glimpse of the man who hid from them in plain sight?” —Mosley, Six Easy Pieces (175) “They see the hat, not me. There is a magic in it. It hides me right in front of their eyes.” —Ellison, Invisible Man (366) Both Ralph Ellison and Walter Mosley explore the predicament of the black man1 struggling to define his identity, to find a home within his community, by making himself visible as an individual. In attempting to locate their own place in the world, the narrator of Invisible Man (1952) and Easy Rawlins, the protagonist in Mosley’s most popular series of detective novels, try on various disguises that the black man has hidden behind in order to survive in America. These disguises have offered safety to the black man, by masking his individuality and rendering him nonthreatening to the white community. Both Ellison’s narrator and Easy seek such safety by temporarily donning the guise of the trickster, or the hustler, the man who uses the white man’s expectations to manipulate both the black and white communities for his own gain. Both men eventually come to realize, though, the incomplete and untenable nature of the visibility offered by such disguises. They seemingly allow the black man to become visible, or recognizable, to the community—at times Ellison’s Invisible Man and Mosley’s Easy Rawlins 71 even providing a temporary safety thereby—but this visibility is false because all the community can see is their own predetermined notions of the role. In the end, both men ultimately seek to find their identity, their home, in some middle ground between their own invisibility and the fraudulent hyper-visibility of folkloric character types like the trickster. Throughout Invisible Man, Ellison’s narrator struggles to become visible as an individual to a world that refuses to accept him as anything other than a stereotypical image. As James B. Lane suggests, “Ellison’s fundamental assumption in Invisible Man was that black people became recognizable only when they suppressed their real self and conformed to emasculating parodies of the white man’s self-contradictory image of them” (65). The black man can become visible to the white community by playing an expected role, but what the community sees is a devalued, inauthentic caricature rather than a whole person. Ellison’s narrator is invisible, then, because people refuse to see him unless he conforms to one of the readily identifiable stereotypes they carry with them; they see instead his “surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except” him (Invisible Man 3). The narrator attempts to force those around him to see him, by struggling to make himself heard by the crowd at the Battle Royal, by developing an identity through his education or employment, and by joining the Brotherhood. In each of these attempts, the narrator is unable to transcend the role he is expected to play and become visible as himself, rather than as a type, to the community at large. Throughout much of the Easy Rawlins series, Easy suffers from an invisibility similar to that of Ellison’s narrator. In fact, Mosley has argued that Easy is a direct descendent of Ellison’s narrator; he is “a concretized invisible man” (Interview with Samuel Coale 204). If he plays his expected role in the community, the white community will assume that they see him, but what they will actually see is only their own preconceived notions played out in front of them. Easy is invisible as an individual because the white community “couldn’t see the man standing in front of [them] but only the man [they] had been trained to see” (CK 99). Moreover, Easy is initially invisible even to his own black community: “Nobody knew what I was up to and that made me sort of invisible; people thought that they saw me but what they really saw was an illusion of me, something that wasn’t real” (Devil 128). No one can see Easy as an individual because he is viewed instead as a projection of the viewer’s own fears, concerns, obsessions, needs, and imaginings. Easy’s invisibility is not entirely particularized; it is the black community as a whole, in addition to the black individual, that remains invisible. The white community ’s refusal to acknowledge the...

Share