Literary Devices In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

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Recommended: Use of symbolism in Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

In Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, the narrator starts off as an ideal black man that believes he must act obsequious towards white authority in order to be as successful as them. He gets accepted into an all black college, but is soon expelled and sent off to Harlem where it seems as though the entire whole world is completely turning on him. As the narrator becomes part of an organization called the Brotherhood, he finally feels part of something. One of the Brotherhood members, who was selling sambo dolls, ends up getting shot by the police and dies, so the narrator puts together a little funeral for him. This upsets the Brotherhood, which has been using him the entire time, but it also allowed him his eyes to open to differences he has with them. The narrator them plans to try to get back at the Brotherhood by seducing one of the member’s wives, Sybil, for information. It ends up not working out and later on in the novel the narrator falls into a manhole under Harlem where he has plenty of time to reflect on his life. He then decides it’s time for him to come out of hibernation and …show more content…

An allusion mentioned in Invisible Man was a reference to Booker T. Washington. In the novel he made the statement “I visualized myself as a potential Booker T. Washington” (18). Booker T. Washington was an African American civil right leader. Numerous similes can be found when the narrator mentioned Sylvester kicking Supercargo “as though he were punting a football” (84) and others “stretch(ed) him out… like a corpse” and laid him in a chair “like an aged doll” (85). Throughout the novel the reader can notice a repetition of the word “invisible”. It was first used in the beginning when he declared “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me” (3) and towards the end when he concluded “I’m an invisible man and it placed me in this

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