Unseeing People: Towards a Clear View of Invisible Characters in Narrative Fiction

Abstract

This article proposes a critical mapping of invisible characters in narrative fiction that accentuates the complex relationship between literary and social invisibility. It argues that the emerging field of invisibility studies needs to come to terms with the motifs and forms of invisibility as they appear in literary history before and after the critical juncture of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), also drawing on H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897) and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) as primary examples. It maintains that invisible characters emerge in a literary field structured by 1) the socio-political opposition between power and powerlessness; 2) the continuum of realist and non-realist genres; and 3) the form of narration as such, particularly in what narratologists define as focalisation. In such fashion, an analysis of literary ‘unseeing’ in the sense developed in China Miéville’s novel The City & The City (2009) will enable a deeper understanding of social invisibilisation.

Keywords

• social invisibility
• literary character
• narratives of invisibility
• invisibility studies
• focalisation
• silence