“I’m a sick man, a mean man.” So says the narrator at the start of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground, releasing a flood of malcontent on anyone who will listen. The nameless narrator of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man—he has a name, but he won’t share it with us—is just as unhappy with the world as it is. But, he assures the reader, “I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either,” even as he does Dostoyevsky one better by actually living underground in a New York subbasement in a building “rented strictly to whites.”

Ellison’s narrator gets away with living rent-free, his quarters comfortably lighted by siphoned electricity, because he is invisible. Not literally invisible in the H.G. Wells–ian sense: Our narrator is Black, and as such, he says, “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

Sometimes that invisibility yields anger, as when, early in the novel, he bumps into a man who, catching a glimpse of him, hurls a racial slur and is very nearly knifed for his transgression. Most of the time, however, the narrator bears his burden with uneasy resignation.

He was not always invisible. While attending college in the South, he is visible enough that he blunders into a boxing ring for a battle royal—“Get going, black boy! Mix it up!” the crowd urges—only to discover his self-preserving skills as an orator and not a fighter. Indeed, he’s “the smartest boy we’ve got out there in Greenwood”—smart enough, at least, to gloss over his earnest call for social equality before that crowd of hostile Whites and, after a subsequent misadventure on campus, to head north to New York, the university president’s words ringing in his ears: “You’re nobody, son. You don’t exist—can’t you see that?”

Invisibility is a survival mechanism of a kind, for when he’s seen at all, he finds trouble, whether through the agency of a Black separatist or a White do-gooder. When visible, it takes him a while to find a job, that university president having written a poisonous letter of reference. For a time, he lands at a factory that hires Blacks only to sidestep having to pay union wages; it’s not for him, but his choices are ever more limited. Finally, tired of his travails, unseen, badly used, and scarcely alive, the narrator descends into the subterranean world, the only place where, he declares, “I’ll be free.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a forerunner of existentialism, is never far from Ellison’s pages. Neither is Ellison’s contemporary Albert Camus. Perhaps surprisingly, Ellison’s great friend Shirley Jackson also figures, her terse story “The Lottery” lending weight to Ellison’s conviction that unreason wins out over reason every time out, particularly when it comes to the madness of the crowd.

Ellison’s book—the only novel he published in his lifetime—was widely lauded on its release in April 1952, including in these pages. It was the first novel by an African American writer to earn the National Book Award. Though often challenged by school board censors, 70 years on, Invisible Man holds a central place in the American literary canon, eminently visible, demanding to be seen and read.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.