The Theme Of Coming Of Age In Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man

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Everyone in life experiences a few events that shape us into the person we are today and we come to terms with who we truly are. Ralph Ellison's novel, The Invisible Man, illustrates the perfect coming of age story with several twisted and striking events. “Bildungsroman, the main character has to experience some form of moral and psychological development”(Apuzen). Ralph Ellison novel falls under the category of a Bildungsroman genre. Ralph Ellison’s novel focuses on a nameless protagonist who struggles to discover himself in a racist world, where he is invisible, based in the 1950’s. The beginning of the novel, we get an inside look that the narrator's journey throughout the novel will be based memories he is reminiscing on. We get an early look at the protagonist explaining that he is invisible to the world based off the color of his skin and how through the events he experienced he finally accepted being invisible “All my life I had been looking for …show more content…

“That was all I needed, I'd made a contact, and it was as though his voice was that of them all. I was wound up, nervous. I might have been anyone, might have been trying to speak in a foreign language. For I couldn't remember the correct words and phrases from the pamphlets. I had to fall back upon tradition and since it was a political meeting, I selected one of the political techniques that I'd heard so often at home: The old down-to-earth, I'm-sick-and-tired-of-the-way-they've-been-treating-us-approach. I couldn't see them so I addressed the microphone and the co-operative voice before me.”(Ellison) When one of the members of the brotherhood gets shot by the police and the Brotherhood doesn't respond to the incident in the way he except them to, he then questions if he wants to be apart of this group, making him question his identity once

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