Racism And Identity In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

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Published in 1952, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is considered one of the most important novels in American literature. Ellison paints a vivid picture of how an African American man lived during 1930s America. Ellison writes about an African American man’s journey to find his place in the world while struggling to overcome the cultural stereotypes that engulf his life. His writing consists of motifs of blindness and invisibility. This book is very controversial, and has been banned from many schools because of its explicit descriptions of African American life during that time period. In Ellison’s Invisible Man, themes of racism and identity are used to portray the struggles of the protagonist as an individual and as a member of an ethnic minority.
Invisible Man is a bildungsroman, meaning that the story revolves around the narrator’s moral growth. Ellison begins his novel with a paradox, that the protagonist has substance, but is still invisible. He struggles with the fact that he is not viewed as an individual (Hardin 7). The protagonist’s name remains hidden throughout the novel. Every person he encounters has a label for him, whether it be “boy” or “nigger”. He is offered a scholarship from the Brotherhood, a college consisting of mostly Caucasian students. He is appointed as their African American spokesperson, allowing himself to be used. They also try to force an identity upon him, while he denies his own emotions (Dykema 1).
Jim Trueblood, an uneducated black man, represents the motif of sin in the novel. He is viewed as a disgrace to the black community. On his porch sits a tin replica of a red apple, symbolizing the forbidden fruit that Trueblood has partaken. His actual sin is incest with his daughter, but his fantas...

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..., then everyone is invisible to them. Invisibility is believed to be Ellison’s main focus in Invisible Man. The narrator struggles with deciding if he himself is truly invisible or not. No one will accept him for who he really is. They refuse to see him simply as a person with normal qualities. Instead, they force different identities upon him until he starts to believe that he is, in fact, invisible (Krasteva 1).
In conclusion, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is one of the most pondered upon novels in American literature. It has forced many people to reanalyze their thoughts and feelings about racial stereotypes. This novel also perfectly depicts the life of the average African American man or woman in past times. Ralph Ellison efficiently used themes of identity and racism to portray the struggles of the protagonist as an African American man and as an individual.

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