Anonymous First Person Narrative In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

The deliberate choice to have an anonymous first person narrative in Invisible Man serves as a way for the audience to intimately delve into the thoughts of the narrator without the barrier of an identity coming between text and reader while the breaking of the fourth wall at the end of the novel explicitly connects reader to text to imbue the moral of the story into the audience. The novel very closely follows a nameless African American male that travels pre-Civil Rights Movement America simply following his dreams of being able to make a living with relatable, very human conflicts that can resonate with a myriad of groups. In short, his life experiences describe the trials of coming of age, going off to college, disappointment, the blue

Cleverly, Ralph Ellison had only a handful of instances where the narrator needed to state his name, and when it was needed to be said, simple lines similar to “I gave them my name” or “I heard my name” are uttered in place. More often than not, in a story the struggles of the protagonist are that character’s issues, a character with a name, identifiable, and separate from the reader, but one cannot pinpoint who exactly the narrator is. Granted, some information is given like the ethnicity, relative age, location, but the omission of a name omits the opportunity for that disconnect from reader to character found in other novels. For example, the reader can’t simply call the narrator “man”, or “he”, or “narrator” without feeling a lack of fulfilment with that title given, so the last option is to simply accept the anonymity and read as though the reader shares every mannerism and experience with the words printed onto the page; every issue, every scorn, every bit of dialogue, every detail is the reader’s for better or for