Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man II

"T-E-R-R-I-B-L-E. No substance! This is the most boring book ever. I couldn't even concentrate on the sparknotes."


"an inferior and turgid work of literature"


"Very dark book that was a huge waste of my time!!!"


"I did not like this book very much, mainly because the narrator rubbed me the wrong way. He came off as very arrogant and even ignorant ... He is the reason that he is invisible! That really made me angry. However, I did like the perspective of the book, even if an aggravating African American man was the narrator."


"A seminal work in 'race relations' -- a genre that should have been banished to idiocy (along with religion and the death penalty) years ago. What I mean by that is this: there is no such thing as 'race,' and people should realize we are all just *people* and move the hell on."


"I thought that it was extremely difficult to actually be interested in this book because of how predictable the story is. Of course the black community would have been oppressed during the 1930's, and of course blacks would be discriminated against by the white people in the community."


"It's actually just kind of dated and doesn't sufficiently enlighten us from a more color-blind age what the black experience was really like under such systemic racism."


"The speech that gets him into college is insightful/passionate enough"


"I have been trying to get through this one for a year, but I just can't take it anymore. I have officially decided to give up on it at the half-way point. Maybe it has a message or some literary value, but I am just not getting it."


"I was done with it after about 15 pages. Of course, the book is about 350 pages, so that really made for some difficulty in my life when I had to write a 10 page paper on it."

YEAH, SOUNDS LIKE YOU HAD SOME REAL DIFFICULTY IN YOUR LIFE THERE


"I'm afraid my stomach was just too weak for this book. I'm highly effected by imagery and this book nearly knocked me off my feet. There just wasn't enough to justify how long it took me to recover from the reading."


"My hate stems from the fact that we spent nearly a month of class dissecting this book and I was never so miserable in my entire life."


I'M AWARDING A PRIZE TO THIS, POSSIBLY THE MOST MEANINGLESS PARAGRAPH I HAVE EVER READ:

"I believe this novel was also written as a narrative, retaining the overall quality found within a narration. The author displayed the style of writing with historical accuracy and radical development. Done in a narrative style with a strong sense of time and place, Ellison was aware of his ideas and character's growth throughout the novel. I strongly believe that Ellison was aware of this theme. He displayed it accurately throughout."