Identity in a Color-Conscious Society in Invisible Man Essay -- Invisi

Identity in a Color-Conscious Society in Invisible Man Critics in the main agree that Ralph Ellisons award winning novel, Invisible Man, is a work of genius, broad in its appeal and universal in its meaning. Its various themes have been stated as the geography of hell . . . the real brotherhood of man (Morris 5), the emergence of Negro personality from the fixed boundaries of southern life (Bone 46), and the search for human and national identity (Major 17). Rich in symbolism and cleverly interwoven, Invisible Mans linear plot structure, told from the first-person, limited point of view, and framed by the Everyman protagonist from his subterranean home, follows the bank clerk in his search for identity in a color-conscious society whose constricting social and cultural bigotry produces an accelerated pattern of violence and oppression which attempts to efface the narrator of his individuality, thus assigning him an invisible non-identity within America. The underlying force in Invisible Man is the atmosphere of America that begins in the early 1900s of the segregated slurred south, and ends in the Norths predominately black neighborhood of Harlem during the 1930s. As critic Marcus Klein states, Everything in the novel has clarified this point that the bizarre accident that has led the Invisible Man to take up residence in an abandoned coal cellar is no accident at all, that the underworld is his inevitable home, that given the social facts of America, both invisibility and what he calls his hibernation are his permanent condition (109). Ellisons protagonist, the effaced narrator, is a young African-American male from the segregated deep south, who b... ...iction New Studies in the Afro-American Novel since 1945. Ed. A. Robert Lee. London survey Press, 1980. 54-73. Klein, Marcus. Ralph Ellison. After Alienation American Novels in Mid-Century. Cleveland World Pub., 1964. 71-146. Langman, F.H. Reconsidering Invisible Man. The Critical Review. 18 (1976) 114-27. Lieber, Todd M. Ralph Ellison and the Metaphor of Invisibility in Black Literary Tradition. American Quarterly. Mar. 1972 86-100. Major, Clarence. American Poetry Review. Nov/Dec. (1973) 17. Margolies, Edward. History as Blues Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man Native Sons A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors. Philadelphia J.B. Lippincott Co., 1968. 127-48. Morris, Wright. The World Below. The New York generation Book Review 13 Apr.1952 5.