Throughout the years, America has been considered to be a place of struggle between ideals and reality, a place where there is a deep and abiding unanswered promise that in various forms has political, racial, religious, moral, economic, and cultural meaning. One way to look back on American history is as the struggle between binaries and complicated transgressions of those binaries: the struggle to resolve or complicate a bi-racial definition of black/white America; the struggle to resolve the tension between union and otherness; the premise of American progress built on the binary of civilization/savagery. Whether it is race anxieties, slavery, fears of cultural mixing and cultural erasure, genocide, segregation, interracial communion, or the entanglements of economic globalism and expansionism, themes of difference and intercultural tension are found throughout the American modernist and post-modernist novels, and manifest themselves in many different ways.
In this paper I have chosen to discuss the African-American other, black identity the way it appears in Ralph Ellison’s rewarding piece of literature,
Invisible
Man . Naturally, it may seem strange that I decided to focus my critical analysis exclusively on a single novel, but this choice was not made out of an attempt to simplify the work necessary for writing this paper. I feared that by choosing to compare
Invisible Man with other African-American piece of writing the analysis of the novel would fail to be as thorough as I wished it to be, and certain aspects in the novel woudl get lost in the comparison, as I would have had to focus especially on the elements that can be the subject of a comparison.
Another reason I have decided to focus only on Invisible Man was the fact that the novel stands out among the works of Ellison’s contemporaries and is characterized by a vision that that is unique during the first half of the twentieth century. What

Ellison did was bring onto the scene a new kind of black protagonist, one at odds with the characters of the leading black novelist at the time, Richard Wright. If Wright’s characters were uneducated, angry, and inarticulate- the consequences of a society that oppressed them- Ellison’s Invisible Man was educated, self- aware, articulate. For
Ellison, unlike the protest writers, America did offer a context for discovering authentic personal identity, and it also created a space for African-Americans to invent their own culture.
Moreover, in his novel Ellison proved that he understood that the aim of art is not social comment, and he refused to exemplify the suffering of his own race in
Invisible Man . In addition, he proved not to have a limited and prejudiced vision, and he emphasized not only the white people’s stereotypes about African Americans, but also the stereotypes that exist within the black community. This was the idea that attracted me most when reading the novel and made me understand that I was standing in front of a unique piece of writing.
In addition, another source of inspiration in writing this paper was a fragment from Invisible Man itself that I came across before even reading the novel, a fragment that I will reproduce below:
“
All my life I had been looking for something and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction, and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer It took me a long time (…) to achieve a realization everyone else appeared too have been born with:
That I am nobody myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man
. ”
The fragment, that I later found that was taken from Chapter One, had such a powerful effect on me due to the fact that there is no mentioning of race, blackness, or racial conflict, the way we would have expected when confronted with a text belonging to a representative of a racial minority. The fragment gives no hint of having an
African-American author, and if I had not known by whom it was written, I would have had no trouble in considering it belongs to a white author. The main idea behind this fragment is the fact that the quest for identity is universal, irrespective of skin colour.

Ellison saw the predicament of blacks in America as a metaphor for the universal human challenge of finding a viable identity in a chaotic and sometimes indifferent world. Ellison understood that the task of every writer is “to tell us about the unity of
American experience beyond all considerations of class, race, or religion”, the way he himself confessed, and in this Ellison was ahead of his time and out of step with the literary and political climates of both black and white America.
In fact, the idea that the reader is left with after reading Invisible Man is that in
Ellison’s novel ethnicity is not separative, but it embraces the mutual flow of influences. In fact, after finishing the novel, I thought that to some extent Ellison’s novel is a literary expression of what Tzvetan Todorov wrote in Race, Writing and
Culture :
“Racism is the name given to a type of behaviour which consists in the display of contempt or aggressiveness toward other people on the account of physical differences
(other than those of sex) between them and oneself. It should be noted that this difference does not contain the word “race” and this observation leads to the first surprise in this area which contains many: whereas racism is a well-attested social phenomenon, race itself does not exist.”
Despite the fact that the focus of this paper is one single novel, I tried not to present it completely disrupted from the body of the African-American literary creation, as I considered that it was paramount to understand the place that the novel holds in history in order to grasp its true meaning. This is why Chapter One focuses on the very evolution of African-American fiction, from the slave narratives to present day fiction.
In writing this chapter I benefited from the help of various critical perspectives that allowed me to apprehend things that I would have otherwise failed to understand.
The first step in writing this first chapter was getting acquainted with The Signifying
Monkey by Henry Gates Jr, which proved to be extremely useful as it offered me an insight into the beginning of the black writing activity and the motivations that propped its emergence. Knowing that I was dealing with the literature of a racial minority I was aware of the fact that these writings were born out of a completely different motivation

from that that gave birth to white fiction and I felt it was necessary to show this in my paper. This is why Gates’ book proved to be extremely useful and the trope of the
Talking Book proved how subjected cultures develop a way of using the "masters'" language in order to retain or gain some independence, or voices of their own.
In addition to The Signifying Monkey , two very useful books proved to be The
Cambridge Companion to the African-American Novel edited by Maryemma Graham and Race, Writing and Difference , edited by the same Henry Gates Jr. Although this present paper is by no means a historical account of facts, the first chapter attempted to render a certain chronological order of the stages in the development of African-
American fiction, not precisely of a historical bias but because such an approach would better present the evolution of the perception of racial issues. Thus, from the Harlem
Renaissance, to the Civil Rights Movement and finally to writers such as Toni
Morrison and Alice Walker the role of racism in African-American novels changed.
They began as essays that denounced slavery, but slowly they became novels about the universal themes of identity and love.
When writing Chapter One, I was helped by several works about African-
American literature that gave me the opportunity to get as ample a picture of this fiction as possible. However, since the focus of my paper was not the general evolution of black literature, the next step in writing this paper was a general presentation of the novel that was under discussion. It was my firm belief that I could not speak about
African-American identity in Invisible Man without presenting the background against which this issue is presented in the novel. Thus, the second chapter is a brief review of the techniques, themes, and symbols that Ellison employs in the novel, with special emphasis on the themes of invisibility and identity that are to be mentioned all throughout the present paper.
However, starting with this second chapter I was confronted with a difficulty that was to emerge when writing the following chapters as well, mainly the lack of critical sources. Although I believe that I have grasped the meaning of Invisible Man , reading critical opinions on the novel would have helped me in getting perhaps an even wider picture and transposing it in my paper. When writing these chapters I was always preoccupied that my view on the novel is to some extent narrowed by the lack of

critical references. Moreover, I feared that my opinions lacked validity without the support of critical references. Yet, it was a risk I was willing to take and I hoped that despite losing critical references, my paper would gain in originality.
Thus, I went on with Chapter Three that aimed to achieve a presentation of the social and political background against which the events in Invisible Man are projected.
Believing that every man is a victim of circumstances, I decided to provide an overall presentation of the Great Depression, the American labour movement and of communism. All these are issues that changed the face of America in the first decades of the twentieth century, and influenced the lives of all American citizens, including those of the Black minority.
All these general aspects being presented, I considered it was appropriate to pass to the actual analysis of the different images of blackness that appear throughout the novel. Chapter Four is a discussion on the instances of African-American individuality and of the conceptions about the right way to be a black man in America, conceptions that have their origins both inside and outside the black community.
Focusing on the main character, I tried to present his odyssey to self-hood, his journey from ignorance to knowledge in order to grasp his true identity independently of the others’ beliefs. Once again I have to mention that since there was no critical biography available on this particular topic, I had to rely exclusively on the text itself, trying to make best use of every single sentence that was relevant for the subject under discussion.
Consequently, my analysis followed the narrator of Invisible Man observing the order of events the way it appears in the novel, emphasizing his innocence while still home in the South and his gradual questioning of himself and everyone else.
Throughout the novel, the narrator finds himself passing through a series of communities, from the Liberty Paints plant to the Brotherhood, each being a microcosm that tried to endorse a different idea on how blacks should behave in society. Chapter Four tries to focus not only on the hero, but also on these communities that he goes through and their representatives, in order to accomplish a complete picture of all the different types of characters that the narrator comes in contact with, and thus with the different types of black identity.

I have chosen to lay emphasis on characters such as Bledsoe, or Ras the
Exhorter as their identities were created on the basis of certain defense strategies for
African-Americans, theories about the supposed right way to be black in America, trying to outline how blacks should act in accordance with this theory. Ultimately, however, Invisible Man finds that such theories only counter stereotype with stereotype, and replace one limiting role with another. The main idea that seemed to be the conclusion of almost every fact analyzed in Chapter Four seems to be that racial identity in multi-cultural America is damaged not so much by the prejudiced thinking of the dominant culture, but by the continuous effort of the minority cultures to try to establish for themselves a pattern of behaviour.
After finishing Chapter Four I was left with the inevitable feeling that there still was something left to say, the feeling that the picture of African-American individuality was not complete yet. Thinking about what was it that was missing, I came to realize that somebody’s identity is not shaped only by circumstances and other people’s behaviour and prejudiced thinking, but also by the baggage of traditions an folklore that one is born with.
Consequently, I decided that it was necessary to dedicate the last chapter of my paper to the analysis of the folk elements that Ellison introduces all throughout his novel. The novel Invisible Man is actually a living proof of the influence that black folklore had on Ellison, and moreover, a tribute that the writer brings to the African-
American culture. What Ellison did was in fact establish the place of Black culture in
American society and prove the prospects that accompany marginal life in the modern world.
Practically, this tradition includes the blues, spirituals, sermons of southern ministers, folktales, street language, colloquial speech of southern blacks like Jim
Trueblood, the wisdom of Mary Rambo and the traditional play upon words. I considered it was paramount to lay emphasis on all these elements, as it was for the first time in the history of African-American fiction that a writer showed that black culture and sensibility was far from the down trodden, unsophisticated picture presented by writers, sociologists and politicians, both black and white. He proved

instead that blacks had created their own traditions, rituals, and a history that formed a cohesive and complex culture that was the source of a full sense of identity.
On the whole, this paper I nothing more than a brief analysis of what I considered to be the African-American identity the way it is presented in by Ralph
Ellison in Invisible Man , with all the elements that shape it: social and political context, stereotypes, ideologies, and folk traditions.
It is commonsensical that one cannot claim an exhaustive treatment of this challenging topic, especially as it would have been more interesting to see how the ideas found in the novel reflect in Ellison’s essays in
Shadow and Act and Going to the
Territory.
However, as no other work by Ellison could be found in our country and in the absence of critical opinions on the novel itself, the paper closely observes the text of the novel, which I used as support and evidence for the statements I made.
Thus, this paper tried to show the different facets of what has been labeled as
“racial identity” or “racial other”, with exclusive reference to
Invisible Man.
Half a century after the publication of this novel, I think we can all agree that Ellison’s view that the self- consciousness of a minority culture can be overcome, that such a culture can realize the opportunities foe greater fulfillment that exist in borderland experience still hold true.

Until well after mid twentieth century, little attention was granted to the
African- American novel by mainstream criticism. In fact, the way the editor of The
Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel , Maryemma Graham, noticed, the earliest studies of such novels laid emphasis on the historical and documentary evidence of the black community and
“evaluated the novel in terms of the prevailing formalist paradigms”
(Graham, 2). However, throughout the decades, due to the contribution of authors such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, or Toni
Morrison the critics understood that the Afro-American novel is not only limited to portraying a certain community and its characteristics and aspirations, but that it is capable to represent general human concerns, multiple cultural issues and that it can engage readers across the economic and racial line.
But instead of simply enumerating the writers and their works, perhaps it would be better to take a closer look at each stage in the development of the African American literature and the changes it brought in the structure and thematic of the novel. What has been generally acknowledged as the starting point of the African American novel was the slave narrative, born out of an attempt to deliver the black man from the silence he was condemned to by his white master. Having in mind Hume’s statement that writing is the ultimate sign of difference between animal and human, we can undoubtedly understand that the narrative was the instrument by means of which the slave became the former slave, the brute became the human being. Thus the black writers were
“implicitly signifying upon the figure of the chain itself”
(Gates,
Introduction, 12). The slavery the African Americans had to endure was even more profound than the mere physical bondage, and what the first slave narratives tried to do was
“to write the slaves out of slavery”
, the way Gates Jr. put it.

When discussing the slave narratives, Henry Louis Gates Jr. mentions the fact that he considers the phrase “literature of the slave” an ironic one, or better said an
“oxymoron” at the literal level of meaning. Giving arguments for his statement, Gates
Jr. mentions the definition of the word “literature” provided by the Oxford English
Dictionary, that is “acquaintance with letters or books”. The term also connotes “polite or human learning” and “literary culture”. Taking into consideration all these, Gates argues that the slave literature cannot be considered to be an example of polite learning .
“Indeed, it is more accurate to argue that the literature of the slave consisted of texts that represent impolite learning and that these texts collectively railed against the arbitrary and inhumane learning which masters foisted upon slaves to reinforce a perverse fiction of the «natural» order of things”
(Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 128)
. Thus, it is not unnatural to claim that the literature of the slave was an attempt to prove that slaves were human persons, not commodities, and it was written as a demonstration of humane letters.
“Black people […] had to represent themselves as speaking subjects before they could destroy their status as objects, as commodities, within Western culture.” (Gates, Monkey, 128) Actually, this is what Gates Jr. believes to have been precisely the paramount motivation of slaves when they began to write.
And, paradoxically, the only way that the slaves could become speaking subjects was by inscribing an authentic black voice in the text of white letters.
The most salient proof that this was at the basis of black narratives is a trope, which, in Henry Louis Gates Jr’s opinion, can be considered to be the African-
American version of Bakhtin’s metaphor of the double-voiced discourse.
1
This trope is called the Talking Book and appears in several black texts that were published in
English by 1815. The first text that illustrates this trope is A Narrative of the Most
Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukasaw Gronnisaw, an African
Prince, As Related by Himself.
In The Signifying Monkey, Gates Jr. discusses this trope and its significance. Gates believes that, the fact that Gronnisaw introduced himself as
1
In Discourse in the Novel , Bakhtin speaks of the possibility of a dialogized or dialogical rhetoric that views all human activity and all human discourse as a complex unity of differences. This dialogized or dialogical rhetoric is not only a multiplicity and diversity of voices, a "heteroglossia," but an act of (and an active) listening to each voice from the perspective of the others, a "dialogized heteroglossia." Its purpose is to test our own and others’ ideas and ourselves and thus to determine together what we should think and how we should live. Its characteristic forms are the expression, juxtaposition, or negotiation of our individual and our cultural differences.

a prince, thus implying that he was educated in the manner of royalty everywhere, implicitly places the book in the tradition of the Noble Savage. Gronnisaw tells of a book from which his master recites prayers every Sabbath. The narrator thus believed that the book talked to his master, but refused to talk to him, as he was black. For
Gronnisaw the book had no voice, it was, as Gates Jr. put it,
“a silent primary text” that was exclusively a reflexion of the white voice only because of its failure to comprise black realities.
Practically, the trope of the Talking Book appears in several slave narratives following that of Gronnisaw.
2
But it is John Jea that finally revises it in his autobiography The Life, History and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea. In The
Signifying Monkey , Gates argues that what Jea does is reverse the associations of
“slave” and “chain”, thus making his condition the metaphor of the very human condition. Jea had been freed by the laws of New York because he had been baptized, but his rights to liberty were confirmed only when he proved his ability to read the
Gospel of John. Thus, Jea literally reads his way out of slavery. The former slave accounts how he was taught how to read by an angel and the text that was chosen for his mastery was the Gospel of John that opens with: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In fact, Jea takes these lines and represents them in the most literal way possible, as only God can satisfy the slave’s desire of knowledge because all the human agencies are denied to him by slavery.
Thus, according to Gates, Jea literalizes the trope, as he erases its
“figurative properties by expanding its compacted denotations and connotations into a five page account of the event that transforms his life in a most fundamental way.”
(Gates, Monkey, 167)
After Jea’s revision, the trope disappears from the slave narratives in the 19 th
century, although Jea’s scene of divine instruction remains the representation of the dream of freedom in the form of the dream of literacy.
Although so far we have discussed the part that the slave narratives played in the birth of African American fiction, we cannot ignore the fact that this fiction was
2 In Signifying Monkey , Gates Jr. enumerates the slave narratives that contained the trope of the Talking
Book, the followed Gronnisaw’s narrative: The Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings with John
Marrant. A Black.
, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiamo , and a narrative of a certain
Cugoano.

also rooted in the white popular novel. It was inevitable for the literate black men in late 19 th
century to come into contact with the written works of the white authors and it would have been impossible for these works not to have been shaped (in terms of form and techniques) by the older and more experienced “relative”, the white fiction. In fact, the very generic name of this type of novel, “African- American novel”, shows its double source of inspiration. The black writers tried to redefine the history and the historical memory,
“to give meaning to an experience that has much to teach when being treated narratively” (Graham, 5), with the very means provided by those that are to be given a lesson.
The acknowledged view is that the greatest slave narrative is the 18 th
century masterpiece The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiamo . However, the direct model for the fiction that was written in the 1850s was not this work, but the writings of Frederik Douglass. During his lifetime, Douglass was presented as the representative coloured man in America, as he was very respectable, and an epitome of confidence and assertiveness. In Gates’ opinion, whenever Douglass wrote or spoke, he did it for the Negro, as in a relation of part for whole; he spoke to recreate the face of the race, its public face. The image of the New Negro that Douglass created served as a source of regeneration and plentitude for many generations of African- American intellectuals. A self-taught former slave, Douglass wrote the Narrative of the Life of
Frederik Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself in order to account his experience as a slave, but also in order to produce an eloquent anti-slavery treatise as his narrative emerged in a popular tradition of slave narratives and slavery fictions that includes Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
. Today, Douglass’ narrative is read as one of the finest examples of the slave narrative genre. What Douglass did was employ narrative styles and forms from the spiritual conversion narrative, the sentimental novel, oratorical rhetoric and heroic fiction. In its somewhat unique depiction of slavery as an assault on selfhood and in its attention to the tensions of becoming an individual, Douglass’
Narrative can be read as a contribution to the literary tradition of American Romantic
Individualism.

Another important African American writer that distinguished himself during the second stage of the evolution of the black fiction that lasted until the First World
War was Booker T. Washington. Born a Virginia plantation slave in 1856, Washington began his life following orders delivered to him by wealthy white Southerners, an experience which was to forever affect his opinions and actions. However, when he was seventeen years old, Washington began to attend Hampton Normal and
Agricultural Institute, a school that emphasized industrial education for black students.
After graduating at Hampton, Washington taught at the college, and due to his success he was chosen to start a new Alabama school, a counterpart of Hampton, that would provide the black children with a minimum education that consisted of writing, reading and arithmetic. Washington’s basic philosophy rested upon his theory of American economics, where certain services were required to exist in order to secure a stable economy. He entered blacks into this equation and practically commanded them to complete the necessary services for the whites as they will thus be able to establish a firm grounding in the national economic structure from which they could advance in society . “ When a Negro girl learns to cook, to wash dishes, to sew, to write a book, or a Negro boy learns to groom horses, or to grow sweet potatoes, or to produce butter, or to build a house, or to be able to practice medicine, as well or better than some one else, they will be rewarded regardless of race or colour” (Washington, 281) His philosophy received major attention in 1895, due to his famous speech at the Cotton
States and International Exposition in Atlanta. In this controversial speech, Washington urged blacks to accept their role in society as being beneath white citizens and he also exhorted the African- Americans to stay out of politics, and to perform manual labour and menial jobs.
3
However, the First World War brought about changes at many levels and after the war literature took many twists and turns, increasing its scope and horizons. As we are discussing here strictly the evolution of the African American literature, we will
3 “Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws [sic] of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.”

obviously emphasize exclusively the changes that occurred in the black fiction. Thus, the period ranging from the end of World War I to around 1935, was known as the
Harlem Renaissance and it represented a complete renewal of all facets of the Afro-
American culture, including music, art, and dance, as well as literature. With the
Harlem Renaissance the Afro-American literature moved to another level; while the past sought freedom and identity as slaves and newly freed citizens, the writers in the
1930s and afterwards dealt with self-discovery and black power. Although both groups developed the themes of equality and race, one suffered to belong while other sought to be an individual. Speaking of the characteristics of the Harlem Renaissance, George
Hutchinson pointed in out in his essay in The Cambridge Companion to the African-
American Novel that
“What was central to the movement known as the Harlem or
Negro Renaissance was the effort of the black writers after World War I to re-create and re-conceptualize the Negro independent of stereotypes and prejudices that had affected the relationships of the Afro-Americans to their heritage and each other.” (50)
As a matter of fact, the Harlem Renaissance succeeded in changing the meaning of the term “Negro Novel”, that before and during the 1920s was used when speaking about novels written by either black or white writers that focused on African American subject matters. The new novels achieved a presentation of the contemporary life with its social and cultural instability, as well as a highlight of the contrasts in cultural politics, and the disagreements about issues such as the meaning and value of racial identity.
Referring to the literary trends that developed during the Harlem Renaissance, we should emphasize that the post-war era gave rise to the literary styles of realism and primitivism among black writers. Primitivism stresses the innate goodness of man as well as the civilization as the evil entity crushing the human spirit and often presents the “noble savage”. With regard to the African- American culture it often lays emphasis on the lives of the lower class people who keep their innate goodness as they are out of the white society’s reach.
Leaving aside this theoretical frame, it is necessary to mention that an important contributor to the primitivism movement was Zora Neale Hurtson, who embraced paganism both in her life and in her writing, as it freed her from the conventional

writing styles. She called attention to herself because she insisted upon being herself at a time when blacks were being urged to assimilate white values in an effort to promote better relations between the races. Hurston, however, saw nothing wrong with being black: "I do not belong to that sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal." , she would say. Indeed she felt there was something so special about her blackness that others could benefit just by being around her. Consequently, her works may be seen as manifestos of selfhood, as affirmations of blackness and the positive aspects of black life. Her most famous work is Their Eyes Were Watching God , published in 1937, and it has been considered a classic of black literature, one of the best novels of the period. We are faced here with a tribute to self-assertion and black womanhood, the story of a young black woman in search of self and genuine happiness, of people rather than things, the story of a woman with her eyes on the horizon. The heroine, Janie Crawford lives conventionally for much of her life. When she finds no real satisfaction in that life, she strikes out, like
Hurston herself, for the territory and the possibility of a better life beyond the horizon.
Although Hurston’s merits cannot and should not be denied, the best known writer of Harlem Renaissance was actually Langston Hughes, whose works acted as a voice born out of frustration and hope for the African-Americans. Among his most famous and appreciated works we can count The Negro Speaks of Rivers and A Dream
Deferred . Hughes, who claimed Paul Laurence Dunbar, Carl Sandburg and Walt
Whitman as his primary influences, is particularly known for his insightful, colourful portrayals of black life in. He not only wrote prose, that is novels, short stories and plays, but he also took up the writing of poetry, and is also known for his engagement with the world of jazz and the influence it had on his writing, as in Montage of a
Dream Deferred.
His life and work were enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Unlike other notable black poets of the period- Claude McKay, Jean Toomer- in Hughes’ work we can notice a refusal to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of black
America. He wanted to tell the stories of his people in ways that reflected their actual culture, including both their suffering and their love of music, laughter, and language itself.

Yet, the evolution of African-American literature did not stop at this. As a mater of fact, in the decades from 1935 to the 1950s, blacks began to take more pride in themselves, and implicitly in their accomplishments and advances, and thus began to speak about the social injustice they were subjected to for so long. Actually, this period is tormented by the first outbursts of the civil right movement, which gave birth to the literary style of naturalism in the African American literature. In the novels that are published during this period, the literary character is usually a tragic hero, controlled by circumstances and by his biology, not by his own free will. Moreover, the characters are portrayed without moral judgment, only as products of their environment and heredity.
The representative naturalistic novel in African-American literature is Native
Son by Richard Wright. With the publication of this novel in 1940, on the literary scene emerged a novel meant to sound the alarm for the whites that their negligence and hostility were soon to be repaid by the blacks, angry at their oppression. The usual naturalistic novel is written with detachment, as if by a scientist surveying a field of operations; it is a novel in which the writer withdraws from a detested world and coldly gathers the evidence for detesting it. Native Son , though preserving some of the devices of the naturalistic novel, “deviates sharply from its characteristic tone: a tone Wright could not possibly have maintained and which, it may be, no Afro-American novelist can really hold for long. Native Son is a work of assault rather than withdrawal; the author yields himself in part to a vision of nightmare”
(Irving, 3). The novel was highly praised by critics and is considered to be a landmark in the history of the African
American novel. As a matter of fact, in
Everybody’s Protest Novel: the Richard Wright
Era , Jerry J. Ward Jr. beautifully described the novel:
“Out of his experiences in the South and the North, out of his vision of social realities fine-tuned by his associations with the communist party, Wright boldly outlined a frightening aspect of race in America: the possibility that incipient pathology among young adolescents who were consistently denied the chance to develop healthy psychosocial identities might manifest itself in extreme violence.” (177).

The success of Richard’s Wright Native Son led to the appearance of similar themes, in novels such as in Ralph Waldo’s Ellison novel Invisible Man . Thus, the novel deals with the themes of individuality and identity in a time when success in life was measured by possessions of a house, a TV set, a car, home appliances and a white face. Moreover, Ellison deals with racism and he explores the effects of the blinding power of prejudice of all people.
Moreover, another writer concerned with the Afro-American realities is James
Baldwin, who wrote about the African American life of the 1950s. His novel The Fire
Next Time seeks for equality, while his autobiographical novel, Go Tell It on the
Mountain deals more with issues of Christianity and self-knowledge. The latter was
James Baldwin’s first novel, one he claimed he “had to write” to come to terms with both his origins in the poverty-stricken Harlem and his fraught relationship with his repressive laborer/preacher stepfather. As a matter of fact, Ward Jr. points out the
“spiritual struggle”
that Baldwin had to go through while writing the novel, a proof of both his “effort to subvert, once more, the impulse so deeply entrenched in African
American Fiction by male writers, that black men should look within the race for models for behaviour” (196) and of his dissatisfaction with Christianity. The early reviews of the novel praised the quality of language and authenticity of the voices – or their “blackness” as would often be the case at that time – and its attention to the inner life of the main character. In fact, the novel was received positively, even enthusiastically, and sealed its author’s reputation as a rising star among the African
American writers. However, Baldwin worried that his book’s initial fame would lock him into having to fulfill expectations as stifling, to a degree, as those that besiege his protagonist in Go Tell It ; that is, he feared being racialized as an artist – a “black writer” of “black novels” – rather than being seen as just a “writer”.
But as the focus of this paper is not the content of Baldwin’s novel, nor that of
Wrights, we should move on to another stage in the evolution of the African American novel, namely the 1960s, that arrived with the Civil Rights movement. It was an era filled with the shouts of “We Shall Overcome” and “Black Power”. The Civil Rights
Movement served as a catalyst for the novel in the social and political realm. What happened was the following phenomenon. In the 1940s and 1950s the Afro-American

writers were
“imprisoned to some extent by paradigms, the same way they were imprisoned by the racial climate of America.” (Graham, 3) After the 1960 there took place a virtual explosion of literary talent and the status of the African- American novel improved and the demand for it increased. The Civil Rights Movement brought about calls for racial integration and equal protection under the law for Afro-American citizens. Thus, there emerged a great need for black writers that would take up the task of expressing what would be understood as “black experience” by an audience often bewildered by the hostility of Malcom X and the Nation of Islam and the unrelenting insistence of Martin Luther King Jr. that justice could only be achieved by peaceful means.
"And we are not wrong; we are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the
Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United
States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of
Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to earth. And we are determined here is Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream."
4
.
Moreover, King’s famous speech delivered on the steps of Lincoln Memorial in
Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963 turned into the motto of the African- American fight for equality:
“
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: «We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.» I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.”
4 Martin Luther King, Jr., MIA Mass Meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church, 5 December 1955

Taking a look at the fiction written during this decade, the 1960s was an era of novels such as Confrontations in Black and White by Lerone Bennett, that followed the feminism and activism of the time period. In his works, Benett moves between the worlds of research and reporting, fighting with the history of race relations in the
United States and the present political surroundings in which Blacks continue to strive for equal opportunity. Bennett establishes himself as a shrewd observer of society's racial injustices, articulating how people of colour can overcome bigotry.
Furthermore, black activists became playwrights—and vice versa—fueling the civil rights movement with their representations of black life on the stage. Lorraine
Hansberry, a young playwright, nevertheless provided the tinder for the fire with her play A Raisin in the Sun . Significantly enough, she became the first black woman to have a play produced on Broadway. Raisin was a tender portrait of a poor black family in Chicago, and was awarded the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1959. Poet and playwright, Amiri Baraka also rose to prominence with his off-Broadway plays, and Ntozake Shange emerged with her meditation on women, For Colored Girls Who
Have Considered Suicide/When the rainbow is enuf .
However, as time passed, the racial issues of the 1960s decreased in severity with the 1970s and the 1980s. Larger social issues seemed to be forgotten, and African-
American writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou created novels that dealt with African-American women and their problems. These novels touched upon racism, but this was no longer their main theme. What they did focus on was the discovery of inner strength, an issue which reaches a group far greater than those that seek racial justice.
As a matter of fact, Morrison, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, has actively used her influence to defend the role of the artist and encouraged the publication of other black writers. In her works she has explored the experience of black women in a racist culture :
"
Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that
cannot bear your company." (from Nobel Lecture, 1993). The Bluest Eye (1970),

Morrison’s first novel, is a novel of initiation concerning a victimized adolescent black girl who is obsessed by white standards of beauty and longs to have blue eyes, and it is a clear statement that black women and their particular problems are to no longer be neglected. Moreover, her second novel, Sula , focused on the friendship of two black women, examining the dynamics of friendship and the expectations for conformity within the community. Actually, the writer’s deep concern for carefully depicting the inner life of her characters and their ability to discover inner strength is noticeable in all the novels that followed. Yet, Morrison did not confine herself to the feminine reality only, as she gained insight into the male world by watching her sons. Morrison' third novel Song of Solomon is told by a male narrator in search of his identity. Tar Baby , set on a Caribbean island, explores conflicts of race, class, and sex, and is the first time she describes interaction between black and white characters, while her next book, Beloved , that won the Pulitzer prize for fiction, was inspired by a true story of a slave.
Although Toni Morrison’s contribution to the development of a novel that expresses the issues of African American women is paramount in Black literature, she was not the only female writer that played a part in this. Recognized as one of the leading voices among black American women writers, Alice Walker has produced an acclaimed and varied body of work, that includes poetry, novels, short stories, essays, and criticism. Her writings portray the struggle of black people throughout history, and are praised for their insightful and enthralling portraits of black life, in particular the experiences of black women in a sexist and racist society. Her most famous work, the award-winning and best-selling novel The Color Purple, chronicles the life of a poor and abused southern black woman who eventually triumphs over oppression through affirming female relationships. Walker has described herself as a "womanist" — her term for a black feminist — which she defines in the introduction to her book of essays,
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, as one who "appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility ... women's strength" and is
"committed to [the] survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female."
On the whole, most black writers depicted the struggles and conflicts of racial issues, but the role of racism in African-American novels changed throughout the years. They began as essays that denounced slavery, but slowly they became novels

about the universal themes of identity and love. Like the writers of any other skin colour, the African- American authors write about their experiences, and therefore most of their writing includes elements that deal strictly with the African-American lifestyle, as it is absolutely necessary for one that wishes to evaluate black culture and life to live the black experience.
Yet, the greatest change of African- American writers throughout the decades lies in the way they seek the answers to their questions. These are no longer directed towards the white man; the quest for knowledge and wisdom takes place within. In fact, the way Maryemma Graham put it in the Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel ,
“to read African-American novels is to be confronted with difference.” (3). Actually, a main difference between the earlier periods of
African- American writing and the present one is, in addition to the voices we hear, precisely “the intensity and creativity with which black writers transform their own and other literary tradition.” (Graham, 3).
Yet another feature of the Black novel is its reputation for linguistic and rhetorical innovation, using reinvention as a narrative construct. In Graham’s opinion
, ”the black novel is one that questions both the objective and subjective reality, recognizes both the continuities and discontinuities in tradition, and considers the relationship between oral and written forms of discourse.”
(5)
What is also very characteristic of the African-American novel is its autobiographical impulse, the continuous need to explain the self in a world that historically denied the existence of this self. And what this impulse manages to do is give intensity to the act of writing a story about black life. In
Crusoe’s Footprints
,
Patrick Brantlinger emphasized one of the things that lies at the origins of black fiction :
“As Frederik Douglass made it clear in the Narrative, the very “ache” for full identity and for full cultural representation was the chief source of cultural creativity. “
(Brantlinger,158). Furthermore,
“the desire for «high culture», which DuBois’s concept of the «Talented Tenth» 5
embodied, was a symbol of racial uplift that expressed an Arnoldian- universalistic concept of culture as “the best” produced by
5 A concept brought by black educator and author W.E.B. Du Bois, emphasizing the necessity for higher education to develop the leadership capacity among the most able 10 percent of black Americans.

the human mind.” (Lorini,160). By means of writing, the African-American writers try to redefine the historical memory as they believe that only by giving meaning to the past they can change the future. The richness and importance of the contribution of racial and ethnic minorities to American culture is unique. Here, more than in any other area of American life, much more than in the realm of business and social life, the premise of American progress built on the binary of civilization/savagery comes closest to reality.

Born in Oklahoma from humble beginnings, Ellison faced a difficult life growing up in the south. He studied music and art at an early age, and moved to New
York City to find work when he was 22. Ellison catapulted onto the literary scene after meeting Richard Wright, author of Native Son . Wright befriended the young writer and encouraged him to voice his experience with racial prejudices.
Consequently, in 1952, Ellison’s first novel was published. In a shifting improvisational style, directly based on Ellison’s own experience of jazz music,
Invisible Man is a book that ranges in tone from realism to extreme surrealism, from tragedy to satire even to comedy. Moreover, the book is rich in symbolism and metaphor, skilful in its use of multiple styles and tones, and impregnated not only with the black experience in America, but also with the human struggle for individuality.
Thus, the fact that the novel spent sixteen weeks on the best seller list and won the
National Book Award in 1953 did not surprise anyone.
Invisible Man achieved one of the most sensational debuts in the American history of the novel, and was regarded by writers such as Saul Bellow and critics such as Irving Howe as a landmark publication.
In order to achieve a better presentation of the images of blackness that Ellison presents in his novel, it would be perhaps more suitable to begin the presentation of the novel with a quick look at the techniques, themes, and symbols that the reader encounters when reading the novel.
Invisible Man is the story of an educated black man who has been oppressed and controlled by white men all throughout his life. Yet, the author does not give us the name of his character that remains nameless during the novel as he journeys from
South, where he studies at a college for African-Americans, to Harlem where he joins an organization named the Brotherhood. Actually, this journey from South to North is

not only one that takes place at the geographical level, but a symbolic one as well. It is a search for true identity. According to Irving Howe
, “Invisible Man is a record of a
Negro's journey through contemporary America, from South to North, province to city, naive faith to disenchantment and perhaps beyond.”
(Howe, 5). Moreover, all throughout his life, outsiders assign him different roles: he is, in turn, a student, a worker, a patient and a member of the Brotherhood. One by one, he discards these roles, as he gets closer to discovering his true self, and consequently, at the end of the novel, he decides to hide in a cellar, planning to undermine the whites. The entire story can be summed when the narrator says:
“I’m an invisible man and it placed me in a hole- or showed me the hole I was in.”
In this general presentation of Invisible Man , let us first refer to the simplest aspects: form and structure. The aforementioned elements do not pose a problem in this otherwise complex novel. Actually, the form is quite simple: it is a chronological narrative with no flashbacks and no confusing chronology. The only formal element that might cause a problem is Ellison’s use of Epilogue and Prologue. The Prologue, which precedes Chapter 1, occurs in time after the action of Chapter 1 to 25 has been completed, but before the Epilogue. In the novel proper, Chapters 1 to 25, the narrator tells the reader what he did to end up in the hole which he describes in the Prologue.
Finally, in the Epilogue, he talks about leaving the hole and going back to the world he temporarily abandoned. The reader does not know how long the narrator has been in the hole, but it may be inferred that his main activity there was writing the novel.
Discussing the plot, we can say that its structure in Invisible Man is schematic.
Ellison used a cumulative plot, that is, one that develops the same basic episode in an emotional crescendo- in our case the narrators’ struggle to observe the commandments of the immediate social group and his plunging into despair after being overwhelmed by the hypocrisy of the others. We can identify four large moments in the plot: 1) the struggle to get to college, the experience with Norton and the expulsion; 2) finding a job in New York, the fight and explosion at Liberty paints; 3) the revival of the hero and his joining the Brotherhood; 4) the meeting with Rinehart, the riots, the confrontation of Ras that ends in taking refuge underground. Each episode develops to a climax followed by a peripeteia. What the epilogue and prologue do is frame the

series of climaxes and interpret the emotional collapse of the narrator in the present tense.
Further in this analysis, we should stop for a moment to discuss the techniques that Ellison resorts to when telling the story. Thus, first of all we should emphasize that the narrator not only tells the story of Invisible Man , but he is also the main character.
As we are talking about a bildungsroman, the narrative and the thematic concerns of the story revolve around the development of the narrator as an individual. Moreover, as the narrator tells the story in the first person, the text doesn’t truly give an insight in the consciousness of any other character. Yet, ironically, though he dominates the novel, the narrator remains somewhat obscure to the reader, as he doesn’t reveal his name.
The names that he is given in the hospital and in the Brotherhood, the name of his college, even the state where the college is located – all these remain a mystery. In fact, it is as if the narrator is reduced to a voice and never emerges as an external and quantifiable presence. But it is my conviction that this technique was not one that
Ellison chose at random. The fact that he chooses to keep the protagonist nameless all throughout the novel is proof of the fact that the narrator is in fact the symbol of every
African-American that is being reduced to nothing by prejudice and stereotype.
Moreover, as the narrator supposedly writes his story as a memoir and not while it is still taking place, he also comes to recognize his former blindness, his own mistakes. As a result, I was able to perceive a division that arises between the narrator as narrator and the narrator as character. Ellison renders the narrators’ voice as that of a man looking back on his experiences with greater perspective, but he makes sure that the reader sees into the mind of the still-innocent character. He manages this precisely by having the narrator recall how he perceived events when they happened rather than offer commentary on these events.
When touching upon the main themes of Ellison’s novel, it would be most natural for the theme of invisibility to be the one to begin with. First of all, it should be established what being an “invisible man” means in the novel under discussion and

how it is different from the physical invisibility in the English writer H.G. Wells’ famous book The Invisible Man .
6
A close reading of Ellison’s novel reveals that the theme of invisibility has three dimensions. First of all, I believe it suggests the unwillingness of others to see the individual as a person.
“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”
(Invisible, 1) Actually, the narrator is invisible because people around him see in him only what they wish to see, not what he really is. Thus, in this sense, I consider that invisibility is the result of prejudice.
Second of all, for me, in this novel invisibility suggests separation from society.
The narrator chooses to separate himself from society and thus isolates himself in the hole, where he cannot be seen by others, thus becoming invisible to them. In this sense, invisibility is associated with hibernation, with the narrator’s deliberate choice to remain in his hole and think. In this case, invisibility is not necessarily presented in a negative light, as it proves to be a source of freedom and mobility. Indeed, my conviction is that it is the freedom the narrator derives from this namelessness that enables him to tell the story. Furthermore, invisibility appears as a position from which one may safely exert power over the others, without being caught. The narrator demonstrates this power he acquired in the Prologue, when the narrator steals electricity from Monopolated Light and Power Company by burning 1,369 light bulbs simultaneously.
And last, but not least, I believe that invisibility suggests lack of selfhood; a person becomes invisible if he has no self, no identity. Similarly, the narrator has no name, is anonymous. Throughout the novel he receives pieces of paper from individuals or groups, each of the papers naming him, identifying him as carrying a certain role: student, patient, member of the Brotherhood. As the narrator tries to define himself through the values and expectations imposed on him, he discovers that, in each case, the prescribed role does nothing more than limit his complexity as an individual and forces him to play an inauthentic part.
6 H.G Wells, (1866-1946), English novelist, journalist, sociologist, and historian, famous for his works of science fiction One of his most famous books is The Invisible Man, a novel about an obscure scientist who invents a way to render skin, bones, and blood invisible, and tries the formula on himself. Due to this experiment, he can go anywhere, menace anyone--sight unseen. He has only two problems: he cannot become visible again--and he has gone quite murderously insane.

From the very beginning of the novel, the narrator stresses the fact that he was innocent, naïve in his past. He admits this as he understands that he was prevented by his innocence from seeing the truth behind others’ wayward behaviour, and thus was made to fulfill their misguided expectations.
“All my life I had been looking for something and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers, too, though they were often in contradiction, and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I ,and only I, could answer,” (15)
Throughout the novel, we see him playing the role of the obedient black man in front of the whites in Chapter One, the industrious disciple of Booker T. Washington during his college years, and the Brotherhood’s spokesperson, which allows the
Brotherhood to use him. However, in my opinion, the narrator proves to be very intelligent and introspective and is able to realize the fact that his social role limits his individuality. Consequently, he gradually assumes the mask of invisibility in order to rise up against his limitations. Thus, we can say that the theme of invisibility and that of identity go hand in hand and dominate the entire novel.
Another theme that Ellison deals with in Invisible Man is racism, which is presented as an obstacle to individuality. On a simple level, the novel is one about race in America, but my conviction is that Ellison plays with the concepts of black and white, in a unique use of the black- white conflict. This happens due to the fact that
Ellison understood that social comment is neither the aim nor the drive of art.
Consequently, he designed a world where race is reflected and distorted, and at no point in the novel was I able to see him trying to exemplify the suffering of his own race. In this respect, we should mention Saul Bellow’s review of
Invisible Man, called
Man Underground
, where the writer acknowledges Ellison’s merits of not adopting a minority tone, which he defines as a “Negro way to go at the problems” . Had he done so, Ellison would have failed “to establish a true middle of consciousness for everyone”.
(Bellow, 2) 7
7 “I was keenly aware, as I read this book, of a very significant kind of independence in the writing. For there is a way for Negro novelists to go at their problems, just as there are Jewish or Italian ways. Mr.

Over the course of the novel, the hero realizes that the complexity of his inner self is limited not only by people’s racism, but also by their more general ideologies.
When reading the novel, we are faced with several examples of ideology, ranging from the ingratiating one of Booker T. Washington to the more violent, segregationist ideology of Ras the Exhorter. Moreover, the Brotherhood preaches an ideology that promises to save the people, although all it truly does is limit and betray the freedom of the individual, fighting stereotype with stereotype. The narrator ends up discovering that the ideologies put forth by institutions are too simplistic and one-dimensional for something as complex as human identity, and that life is too complex to be bound up neatly in an ideology.
Shifting our discussion from the themes to the motifs in Invisible Man , we should mention that among the motifs that can be identified in novel, that of blindness is probably the most central one. In my opinion, throughout the novel, blindness usually suggests people’s willful avoidance to see and confront the truth, and it is caused by prejudice. Moreover, several characters refuse to acknowledge things about themselves and their community and this refusal emerges consistently in the imagery of blindness. Thus, the boys fighting in the “battle royal” wear blindfolds, which in my opinion symbolize their failure to recognize their exploitation by white men. The
Founder’s statue at the college has empty eyes, signifying the fact that his ideology constantly neglects the racist realities. Blindness also afflicts Reverend Homer A.
Barbee, who idealizes the Founder, and Brother Jack, who lacks an eye- which he hides by using a glass eye. Actually, although he initially appears to be compassionate and kind and claims to support the rights of the socially oppressed, Brother Jack is dominated by racist view points and sees nothing else in people but tools.
It is essential for any general presentation of a novel to touch upon the symbols that the writer encoded in his piece of writing, and this presentation is by no means an exception. When speaking about Invisible Man, first of all we should mention the symbolism of names. It is my conviction that characters’ names, the club names, those of the factories, places, institutions, were not chosen randomly and could be explored
Ellison has not adopted a minority tone. If he had done so, he would have failed to establish a true middle-of consciousness for everyone.”

indefinitely. Thus, for instance, the Brotherhood has its parties at a place called the
Chthonian Club, which is a classical reference comparable to that of the Sybils. The
Chthonian realm
8
belonged to the underground gods and spirits. And it is obvious that for Ellison true power is an underground influence, a fact we can see by watching
Bledsoe, Brockway and Brother Jack in action, as well as the narrator in his hole. In addition, one of the most memorable characters in the novel is Ras the Exhorter, and his name literally means “Prince” in one of the languages of Ethiopia, and it also sounds simultaneously like “race” and “Ra”, the Egyptian sun god. All these allusions capture the essence of the character: as a passionate black nationalist, Ras is obsessed with the race issue; as a charismatic leader, he seems to have a sort of god-like power in the novel.
Furthermore, Ellison relies heavily on the symbolism of vision: light, colour, perception, sight, insight. These are related to the dualism of black and white, the complex problem of identity. How does the African-American see himself and how do the others see him? Do they actually see him as he really is or are they just looking at a stereotype, a caricature?
Constantly, throughout the novel it is implied that what prevents people from seeing one person’s true identity is prejudices. Throughout the novel, Ellison used material representations for these prejudices, using symbols such as Tod Clifton’s
Sambo doll (Chapter Twenty) and the coin bank in the shape of the grinning black man
(Chapter Fifteen).The coin bank that portrays a slave eating coins suggests the idea of the slave that ingratiates himself with white men for trivial rewards. In addition, the
Sambo doll is made in the image of the slave who, according to white stereotype, is lazy but at the same time very submissive in front of the white master.
After themes and symbols, the next element that should be mentioned in this general presentation is the style that Ellison adopted when writing Invisible Man.
First of all, we should mention that we are not talking about an easy novel to read. Ellison shows a dazzling use of language in shifting styles, thus creating a stylistic
8 The Chthonic deities inhabited the opposite realm from the Olympians- the Earth or the Underworld
( chthon means earth in Greek). These immortals therefore acquired a slightly more dark and shadowy aspect than their bright Olympian counterparts. Nevertheless, certain chthonic gods had their place in the
Greek pantheon, for they fulfilled certain fundamental needs, including providing an explanation for what happens to mortals after death.

performance of the highest order. First of all, one of the most important stylistic devices employed by Ellison is word play. He absolutely loves puns, rhymes, slogans, and paradoxes
. “I yam what I am”
(266) cries the narrator, after buying a hot buttered yam from a street merchant in Chapter Thirteen.
“If it’s Optic White it’s the Right
White”
(220) is a slogan for the Liberty Paints factory recited by the black Lucius
Brockway, reminding of the old southern expression “If you’re white, you’re right”.
“All it takes to get along in this here man’s town is a little shit, grit and mother wit”
, says Peter Wheatstraw, a street blues singer in Harlem. Not only are this expressions funny, but they also embody folk wisdom that the narrator needs to hear and understand in order to find his true self.
Yet, these are not the only stylistic characteristics of Invisible Man . We should also mention the enormous stylistic range that Ellison adopts in his novel. In Chapter
Two he describes the college in the style of the poet T.S. Eliot, calling it “a flower- studded wasteland”
, while in Chapter Four he writes a sermon shaped on the classic oratory of black preachers throughout the South in early twentieth century. As a matter of fact, when speaking about the styles employed in his novel, Ellison himself described as it follows:
“In the South, when he –the narrator- was trying to fit into a traditional pattern and where his sense of certainty had not yet been challenged, I felt a more naturalistic treatment was adequate… As the hero passes from the South to the North, from the relatively stable to the swiftly changing, his sense of certainty is lost and the style becomes expressionistic. Later on during his fall from grace in the Brotherhood it becomes somewhat surrealistic. The styles try to express both his state of consciousness and the state of society. ”

Invisible Man is not a historical, nor a social novel, as Ellison understood that social comment is neither the aim, not the drive of art. Yet, the novel deals with the past as a burden and as a stepping stone to the future, as the hero discovers, the way he himself confesses, that history moves not like an arrow, but like a boomerang: swiftly, cyclically, and dangerously. Moreover, although they remain in the background, the social and political elements should always be taken into consideration when discussing African American individuality in the novel, as circumstances always play a significant part in the shaping of one’s identity. The relation between North and South, the Depression in the 1920s, the labour movement, and the spread of the communist ideology- all these are issues that changed the face of America in the first decades of the twentieth century, and influenced the lives of all American citizens, including those of the Black minority.
The element that we are to open our analysis with is the contrast between
Northern and Southern America, as this is the largest and most important element in the very setting of the novel. As a matter of fact, chapters from One to Six take place in the
South, while chapters Seven to Twenty- Five take place in the North, with Chapter
Seven as a transition. The narrator follows the traditional path taken by all heroes in the
African American folklore, considered to be the road to freedom, that is he leaves the
South and goes North.

Although Ellison does not provide the reader with a direct description of the
South and its living conditions, the image that the reader can infer from the facts told by the narrator is not a positive one. Thus, the South is presented as having restricting bonds with rigid distinctions between black and white. Chapter One, that describes the
“battle royal”, presents blacks in their most undignified situation- on public display in the white world, entertaining the very white people that humiliate them: young black men are made to fight blindfolded to the amusement of the white “big shots”, and moreover to scramble over an electrified rug in order to gather fake gold coins.
What is extremely interesting is the fact that probably the best example of servile attitude towards white people is provided by one of the most respectable men in the Black community, Dr. Bledsoe, the president of the narrator’s college. Bledsoe, who is a supporter of Booker T. Washington’s ideas, thinks that blacks can best achieve success by working industriously and adopting the manner of speech of the whites.
Moreover, he proves that he is capable of turning against his own black community if his social position and authority are threatened, and this is why his guiding principle is that of showing the white man nothing more than what he wants to see.
Ironically, it is this man that the narrator admires most at this stage in his life, and not even the fact that he is wrongfully expelled puts a stop to this admiration.
Actually, it is my conviction that in order to grow, the hero must stop idealizing this southern world and its leaders. To do this, he has to be faced with the freer, yet more dangerous world of the north, of New York, more precisely, that can be considered to be a microcosm of the North. Although it is not as rigidly separated as the south, New
York can also be characterized by a certain degree of separation between the black
Harlem and the predominantly white downtown.
As a matter of fact, Harlem is the very center of black life and culture, the place where Ellison himself lived for a number of years after leaving Tuskegee Institute in
Alabama. In order to find his true identity, the black must experience and understand
Harlem. However, it should be pointed out that, ironically, in Invisible Man , the
Brotherhood, that fights for the rights of the oppressed, including those of the African
Americans, has its main office downtown. It is here that the hero comes to visit white
“brothers and sisters”, and where Tod Clifton is killed by a white policeman. Moreover,

a key fact is that when the narrator joins the Brotherhood, he leaves his room at Mary
Rambo’s house in Harlem to take more expensive rooms in the white part of New
York. Thus, it seems that the hero rejects Harlem, this way rejecting in my opinion precisely his very blackness.
To sum up, we can say that the novel illustrates a clear distinction between
North and South, but it is not the typical one that represented the South as a place of restrictions and imprisonment, and the North as the land of freedom. Ellison plays with the symbolism of black and white, freedom and confinement, turning it inside out. The same thing happens with the relation North and South. The North is presented as being a freer place, but only on the surface level, as the narrator’s experiences prove that New
York is a very dangerous place for one’s identity.
With the crash of the stock market in 1929, the United States of America plunged into what is known as the Depression, caused mainly by overproduction, underconsumption, a prolonged agricultural fall, and an uneven distribution of wealth.
Before the crash, America welcomed the stock market and invested its money freely in it, but after the depression set in, investment was discouraged. The optimism of the
Roaring Twenties was over and the next era of US history, depression, began.
A mass phenomenon during Depression was unemployment. As a matter of fact, millions of Americans were unemployed, and Hoover was not providing enough relief to aid the unemployed in either finding decent living arrangements or finding any type of work. Even with a job, the low wages and shorter hours made it difficult to earn enough money to live decently. Moreover, families without an income, who were not able to pay their rent, were evicted from their homes. Left unemployed and homeless, these people built sheds out of cardboard and other trash. Children even played games called “Eviction” and “Relief” during the time they were not searching through garbage for food.

Thus, we can say without a doubt that the Great Depression had a big impact on all people living in America, but it was especially hard on the African Americans.
Actually, the narrator of Invisible Man remembers certain events from the childhood, that show the effect of the Depression on his family, such as eating cabbage day after day, when they were left without money. In fact, it seems that the hero constantly lives with the smell of cabbage. Smelling cabbage while he is in Mary’s house is a reminder of his childhood in the south but it is also a signal that he must find a job as Mary was left with little money. The association between cabbage and poverty was an involuntary one, as cabbage was the cheapest food to consume, and the days when this was the only food to consume represented a shortage of money and hard times.
Furthermore, the old saying that blacks were the last hired and the first fired held true. By 1932, 50% of the African American population in the US was unemployed. This gave birth to a massive migration of the Blacks to the North. As a matter of fact, Invisible Man is part of this migration as he travels to Harlem, the largest black community in the United States. The migration of the blacks upset the whites there, who believed that the African Americans stole their jobs, and thus the lynching of blacks became a very common practice. There was also a large growth in the Ku Klux Klan during the Depression. In addition, because of the outcry of white citizens, Negroes were not treated equally in the work force, having lower wages, and being excluded from unions. The narrator of Invisible Man comes to realize this when, while working at a paint factory, he accidentally enters an union meeting and is nearly attacked by the union members. Moreover, in an outburst of anger, Ras tells his people not to listen to Invisible Man who wants to work with the white man because it is the same white man that took their business away.
The fact that Blacks had to endure so much humiliation from the white men during depression was also due to the fact that they did not own much business.
Although they congregated around major areas, they could not stabilize their own economy. Blacks found themselves without jobs or without business in their place of work. The black economy was non-existent, and this led to the black power movement in both the 1950s and the 1960s.

Moreover, the issue of the Depression is also alluded to symbolically. When the narrator is injured in an explosion at Liberty Paints, he is taken to hospital, where doctors try to cure him. I believe that these doctors may be seen as figures representing president Hoover when he tried to “cure” the depression in America. The doctors do what they think it’s best for the hero, by giving him electroshock therapy, but this only ends up confusing, not helping, the character. As a matter of fact, by using the wrong treatment, the doctors create a feeling of turmoil and helplessness for him, when he is in the glass box. He is confused and shocked, literally, about his situation, and the doctors seem to have made his condition worse. This is precisely what Hoover did to
America when he tried to ease depression in the US. What he tried to do was solve the problem, but he used the wrong tactics and ended up not only not helping the country at all, but causing even more problems.
Another scene in the novel that is symbolic for Depression is the one when the hero makes an unexpected speech at an eviction. Evictions were very common practice during depression and caused many uprisings in the black community. The people who could not afford to pay rent were simply kicked out of their home one day. All their belongings were left on the street and it was up to those evicted to determine what to do and where to go. In the novel, the situation is even more dramatic as the couple that is being evicted is an old one, and simply wants to be allowed back in their house one final time to pray.
Although the elderly couple believes that nothing can be done to stop evictions, the Brotherhood disagrees The Brotherhood is a communist organization, similar to some of the ones prevalent during the 1930s.
The way Irving Howe put it Black Boys and Native Sons
, “
If Native Son is marred by the ideological delusions of the 30s, Invisible Man is marred, less grossly, by those of the 50s” (7). Many critics did not approve Ellison’s depiction of the

communists, as, in Saul Bellow’s words, the hero’s “experiences in the Communist party are not as original in conception as other parts of the book”
(2). The middle section of the novel deals with the Harlem communists, having the Brotherhood and its most prominent members as a focus point.
The leader of the Brotherhood is Brother Jack, whom Ellison uses to point out the failure of abstract ideologies to address the real troubles of African Americans and the other victims of oppression. As a matter of fact, throughout the book, Jack explains the Brotherhood’s goals in terms of an abstract ideology. He tells the narrator in
Chapter Fourteen that the group works
“for a better world for all people”
(280), and that the organization is striving to remedy the effects of too many people being
“dispossessed of their heritage”
(280). He and the other brothers attempt to make the narrators speeches more scientific, injecting them with abstractions and jargon, in order to distance them from the harsh realities that the narrator seeks to expose.
In fact, for many African American intellectuals in the 1930s, Ellison included, the Communist Party seemed to offer a kind of salvation that Jack appears to embody- only to betray and discard the African American cause as the party’s focus shifted in the early 1940s. Consequently, what Ellison does in his manner of dealing with the
Brotherhood in Invisible Man is criticize the poor treatment that he believes that the black community received from communism. However, the critics argued that Ellison exaggerated to some extent his depiction of the communists, as, in Irving Howe’s opinion, he made
“his Stalinist figures so vicious and stupid that one cannot understand how they could ever have attracted him or any other Negro.” (7)
Obviously, the leaders of the party did manipulate the members, as Jack himself confesses:
“We do not shape our policies to the mistaken and infantile notions of the man in the street. Our job is not to ask them what they think, but to tell them.”
(473).
Howe’s comments in
Black Boys and Native Sons seem to contain the feelings expressed by all the critics with regard to Ellison’s presentation of the communists.
“
That the party leadership manipulated members with deliberate cynicism is beyond doubt, but this cynicism was surely more complex and guarded than Ellison shows it to be. No party leader would ever tell a prominent Negro Communist, as one of them does in Invisible Man: "You were not hired [as a functionary] to think"--even if that were

what he felt. Such passages are almost as damaging as the propagandist outbursts in
Native Son.
“(7)
Even before Depression, the American labourers worked too many hours for too little money in dangerous conditions, and union members faced the added tension of job discrimination. It was obvious that the industry needed guidelines to control the clashes between companies and workers that were inevitable to ensue. Politicians made weak attempts to protect the interests of labour organizations, but these gestures accomplished nothing as they were too broad and were manipulated very easily, and thus most companies simply ignored them.
Thus, a change in the working world was paramount. 1932 was the year when labour finally received noticeable support in the political field. With the passing of the
Norris- La Guardia Act, employers could no longer keep workers from joining unions, and it was no longer illegal for unions to organize. Furthermore, the biggest victory of organized labour came with Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act that stated, among others, that employers should comply with maximum hours, minimum wages, and other standards.
9
Despite all this, many corporations, afraid of the unions and their gradual distance with political and judicial America, considered that it was better to take matters into their own hands. They hired spies to report on union activities, to stir up discontent among employees and generally block labour organizations. All these subversive activities that were taking place led to a growth of the suspicion of union members regarding possible spies. As a matter of fact, in Invisible Man , the members
9 The NRA ‘s famous section 7(a) stated that industrial codes should contain three important provisions: employees should have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, free from interference from employers; no one seeking employment should be required to join or refrain from joining a union; and employers should comply with maximum hours, minimum wahes, and other standards determined by law

of the paint union quickly accuse the narrator of being a spy. By taking into consideration only his appearance, the group writes him off as a spy, saying he
“looks as a fink. A first class enameled fink!”
(219)
The fact that he is labeled as a spy without even being allowed to speak and say who he is, prove to the narrator that his individuality is denied by the workers’ community, just like it was so many times before when he was back home in the South.
For the first time he is aware that the society does not allow him to express his true self, and he will reach the same conclusion during his period spent as a member of the
Brotherhood. Thus, it is beyond any doubt that the social and political circumstances play an important part in the hero’s journey from ignorance to knowledge, although
Ellison chooses to keep them in the background of his novel.

Invisible Man was heavily influenced by the work of the French existentialists.
Writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus explored the question of individuality and the nature of meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe. What
Ellison did was adapt the existentialists’ universal themes to the black experience of oppression and prejudice in America.
As a matter of fact, in Shadow and Act, published in 1964, Ellison explained that people around him tried to tell what a Negro is, without first attempting to discover what a Negro had been:
“Everybody wants to tell us what a Negro is (…) But if you would tell me who I am, at least take the trouble to discover what I have been.” Ellison understood the African American dilemma, that of being divided between the Negro identity and the American one, and this is why he wanted
“to explore the full range of
American Negro humanity and to affirm those qualities which are of value beyond any question of segregation, economics, or previous condition of servitude.”
(Shadow, 115)
In a typical existential manner, throughout Invisible Man the reader witnesses the narrator’s odyssey to selfhood, his journey from ignorance to knowledge. Actually, his journey is a very painful one, as he has to go through a series of initiations from the battle royal in Chapter One to the humiliating exposure by the young Mr. Emerson in
Chapter Nine, to the experiences with the Brotherhood in the later chapters. Though most of the character’s difficulties arise from the fact that he is African American,
Ellison repeatedly emphasizes his intent to render the narrator as an universal character, a representation of the struggle to define oneself against social expectations. Thus, in the Introduction he wrote to Invisible Man in 1981, Ellison said:

“So my task was one of revealing the human universals hidden within the plight of one was both black and American, and not only as a means of conveying my personal vision of possibility, but as a way of dealing with the sheer rhetorical challenge involved in communicating across barriers which consists of the many strategies of division that were designed, and still function to prevent what would otherwise have been a more or less natural recognition of the reality of black and white fraternity.”
(xxii)
Moreover, in his novel Ellison proved that he understood that the aim of art is not social comment, and he refused to exemplify the suffering of his own race in
Invisible Man . In addition, I believe he proved not to have a limited and prejudiced vision, and he emphasized not only the white people’s stereotypes about African
Americans, but also the stereotypes that exist within the black community.
In fact, critics discussed that Ellison’s
Invisible Man comes in opposition with another extremely famous African American novel, that is Native Son by Richard
Wright.
If Wright's protest literature was a natural outcome of a brutal childhood spent in the deep South, Ellison's more affirming approach came out of a very different background in Oklahoma. A "frontier" state with no legacy of slavery, Oklahoma in the
1910s created the possibility of exploring a fluidity between the races not possible even in the North. Although a contemporary recalled that the Ellisons were "among the poorest" in Oklahoma City, Ralph still had the mobility to go to a good school, and the motivation to find mentors, both black and white, from among the most accomplished people in the city. Ellison would later say that as a child he observed that there were two kinds of people, those "who wore their everyday clothes on Sunday, and those who wore their Sunday clothes every day. I wanted to wear Sunday clothes every day."
Thus, while Wright’s novel was considered to be a social-realist novel, or a
“protest novel”, the way Maryemma Graham argues in the
Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel , Invisible Man is characterized rather by
“the impressionism of high-modernism” (Graham, 2). The same literary critic describes
Wright as having a “pathological sense of black life”
(2), while Ellison is characterized by
“a more inventive, regenerative vision of black culture.”
(2). Consequently, many

critics avoided to call Invisible Man a Negro novel, although it was written by an
African American and dealing with the experiences of an African-American, precisely because the search for identity is something that is characteristic for all humankind.
When reading the novel it actually seems that the question “Who am I?” echoes all throughout it, although the novel opens with the very answer to this question:
“I am the invisible man.”
(3) As a matter of fact, Invisible Man is built around this metaphor which provides the title as well. The main idea is that someone who is black has difficulty in being accepted as being a person, instead being put by society into a variety of stereotyped roles.
Throughout the novel, the narrator finds himself passing through a series of communities, from the Liberty Paints plant to the Brotherhood, each being a microcosm that tried to endorse a different idea on how blacks should behave in society. It is my conviction that as the narrator tries to define himself through the values and expectations imposed on him, he ends up discovering, in each case, that the prescribed role limits his complexity as an individual and forces him to play an inauthentic part:
“All my life I had been looking for something and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers, too, though they were often in contradiction, and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer,” (15)
The narrator’s odyssey to selfhood begins when he is still home, in the South.
While he is still a boy, the narrator is faced with the first stereotype of what was the supposed right way to be black in America. His grandfather explains his belief that in order to undermine and mock racism, blacks should exaggerate their servility to whites:
“Son. After I’m gone I want you to keep up the good fight… Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agee
‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or burst wide open.”
(17).

This is the first theory about how blacks should behave that the narrator is confronted with. The image of the black man that is fighting the whites by being servile in an exaggerate way is to haunt the narrator all his life and make him live in a permanent state of confusion , especially during his school years.
As a matter of fact, as a boy, the hero is very intelligent, and is seldom praised by white men for his conduct. However, these praises did nothing more than increase his torments as he thought that the white men should not really be pleased with his behaviour, that, according to his grandfather’s advice was a method of actually undermining the whites. On the other hand, had he tried to act in a “sulky and mean” manner, the whites would not have perceived it as a positive manner of behaving. It seems that the narrator is always caught between trying to please the whites and trying to respect his grandfather’s memory by following his advice.
Eventually, trying not to think of his grandfather’s words, the narrator comes to be a gifted public speaker, and, consequently, is invited to deliver a speech at a meeting of the town’s leading citizens. However, the hero is forced to fight in a “battle royal” against other young black men, all blindfolded, in a boxing ring, in order to entertain the town’s “big shots ” (17). The white men prove even crueler as they force the youths to scramble over an electrified rug in order to gather fake gold coins.
However, despite the appalling cruelty of the white men, the narrator delivers the speech and accepts a scholarship he is granted afterwards with gladness and gratitude. Underneath their elegant tuxedoes and their refined taste for whiskey and black cigars, the brutish white men prove to be appalling racists that see the black young men as nothing more than means of entertainment, being obviously bothered by the narrator’s mentioning the phrase “social equality” instead of “social responsibility”.
Despite all this, the narrator proves to be extremely innocent and inexperienced, being prone to think the best of people even when he has reason not to, being constantly respectful of authority.
In fact, we can say that the narrator’s innocence prevents him from recognizing the truth behind others’ errant behaviour and leads him to fulfill their misguided expectations. Thus, he plays the role of the servile black man in Chapter One, while in the following chapter we see him playing the industrious, uncomplaining disciple of

Booker T. Washington during his college years. The reader is presented with another image of blackness and yet another stereotyped view of how blacks should behave, all embodied by Dr. Bledsoe, the president of the narrator’s college. The hero admires
Bledsoe, as he was
“influential with white men over the country, and was consulted on race issues, he was a leader of his people, and the possessor of not one, but two
Cadillacs, a good salary, and a soft, good-looking and creamy- complexioned wife ”
(101). What Bledsoe preaches is the idea that blacks can best achieve success by working industriously and adopting the manners of speech of whites, and this idea was systematically taught to the students that ended up denying their own blackness, as they hated the “black belt” people, the peasants who only pulled the race down.
In fact, with his innocent, naïve nature, the narrator is an easy prey to Bledsoe’s doctrine, and soon sees himself as a potential Booker T. Washington, never questioning the authority of Dr. Bledsoe or of the white trusties. Thus, when asked to drive around the campus one of the white trusties, Mr. Norton, the hero does everything he can to please the guest, taking him wherever he wishes to go, although this implies seeing some of the taboo places in the campus, such as Jim Trueblood’s cottage and the
Golden Day. In my opinion, for Mr. Norton, who is a narcissistic white man, Invisible
Man is nothing more than a proof that he is liberal minded and philanthropic.
At the Golden Day, the two talk to a veteran, and institutionalized black man who makes bitterly insightful remarks about race relations, trying to expose the dangers of the school’s ideology. In fact, his bold candour angers both the narrator and Mr.
Norton, as the veteran exposes their blindness and hypocrisy, pointing out the sinister nature of their relationship. The veteran presents the narrator as an invisible man,
“a walking zombie”
who has learned to suppress his emotions and his humanity, which is exactly the achievement of Mr. Norton’s dreams,
“the mechanical man”
(94). Both men are unable to see each other as they really are, that is Mr. Norton sees only a
“school-card of his achievement , “a thing, not a man”
(94), while the narrator sees in a
“God, a force”
(94).
Although Mr. Norton himself had requested to see the campus, the mirrors of his success in life, he is not exactly pleased with what sees, and Dr. Bledsoe’s reaction to this is unforgiving with the narrator. The fact that the hero showed Mr. Norton the

unpleasant aspects of the campus is considered as an act of betrayal against the entire race by Bledsoe. But what is even more painful for Invisible Man is the fact that his sole purpose during the day spent with Mr. Norton was pleasing him by doing everything he was requested to do, following precisely the doctrine of servitude that the college taught him. It is my conviction that by doing this, the narrator proves that he has internalized the values imposed to him by the society where he lives, only to find that these values are not believed in by those who proposed them. As a matter of fact,
Bledsoe now emphasizes that the only way to please a white man is to tell a lie, to show him an idealized image of black life, and moreover, he believes that his fellow
African Americans do not exist, that they are nothing, and that the only reason why he puts on a mask of servility to the white community is his desire to maintain his status and power.
It is after the discussion with Bledsoe that the narrator feels he is losing his identity for the first time in his life. He believed with all his heart in the principles of the Founder taught at the college, principles that guided his whole existence. Now, he is expelled from college and has to travel north in order to find a job that would allow him to fulfill his dream of returning to the college. Thus, once again the narrator proves his innocence, as he fails to see that Bledsoe is nothing more than an ambitious man who would lynch every black man in the country only to keep his position of authority.
He sees in him only the image of the educated, wealthy and powerful black man that he himself wishes to be.
Reading the last pages of Chapter Seven describing the narrator’s hopes and dreams for the future, we are confronted with his inability to see himself as an individual person, to define himself and his goals independently of the others’ expectations, as well as with his perpetual obsession with pleasing the others. When leaving for New York, all he can think of is how he will shower Dr. Bledsoe with favourable reports when returning to college, how he will impress with his manners and appearance the “big men” to whom his letters of recommendation were addressed.
Perhaps the advice that the narrator receives from the veteran at Golden Day on the bus is the best piece of advice that he received so far, as it encourages him to express his individuality: “Come out of the fog, young man. And remember you don’t have to be a

complete fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don’t believe in it- that much you owe yourself (…) Play the game, but play it your own way- part of the time at least.”
(153)
However, thee narrator’s self denial continues when he reaches New York. His first weeks in New York are a continuous abstinence from pleasures that would make the others’ stereotyped reasoning apply the label “south” to him, and thus be prone to think the worst of him. In Chapter Nine we see him refusing to eat pork chop offered to him in a restaurant, thinking that this would prove that he is one of the uneducated and rough African Americans in the south. Moreover, when he speaks he always disciplines himself
“not to speak too much like a Northern Negro; they wouldn’t like that. The thing to do is to give them hints that whatever you did or said was weighted with broad and mysterious meanings that lay just beneath the surface. They’d love that.
” (178). Everything the hero does is governed by the desire to be approved, to be loved by others. This is why his disillusionment is even greater when he finds out the truth about Bledsoe’s letters of recommendation: “What did I do? I always tried to do the best thing.” (191)
With the help of young Mr. Emerson, the narrator tries to defeat his disappointment and gets a job at a paint factory. Liberty Paints achieves financial success by subverting blackness in the service of a brighter white. The narrator finds himself in a process in which white depends heavily on black- both in terms of the racial structure of the workforce. Yet, the factory denies this dependence in the final presentation of the product, where there is no mentioning that the key element in the incredibly white paint was black. As a matter of fact, with the paint’s claim that its trademark “Optic White” can cover up any tint or stain, Ellison makes a pointed observation about American society’s intentions to cover up black identity with white culture, to ignore difference, and to treat the darker-skinned individuals as “stains” upon white purity. Optic White is made through a process that involves the mixture of a number of dark-coloured chemicals, out of which one appears to be “dead black”. Yet, the dark colours disappear into the swirling mixture, and the paint emerges a gleaming white, showing no trace of its true components. The labour relations within the plant manifest a similar pattern: black workers perform all the crucial labours, but white

people sell the paint and make the highest wages, never acknowledging their reliance upon their darker skinned counterparts. This dynamic, too, seems to mirror a larger one at work within America as a whole.
Working at Liberty Paints, the narrator feels directly the blinding power of stereotype. First of all, the union members accuse him of being a spy sent by the management, a “fink”, giving him this label without even allowing him to speak for himself. And, on the other hand, Lucius Brockway, the black man whose assistant he is, accuses him of being a union member and fires him, without even listening to the narrator’s attempts to defend himself. Up to this moment, the narrator was used to never questioning the accusations made to him, to be submissive and respectful of authority:
“You were trained to accept the foolishness of such old men as this, even when you thought them clowns or fools.” (225).This is the moment when the narrator finally breaks with the doctrine that governed his childhood and his college years, and decides to defend himself no matter the consequences.
The fight with Brockway makes the two neglect the paint-making, and consequently, one of the unattended tanks explodes. Waking up in the plant’s hospital, the narrator experiences literal loss of identity, suffering from memory loss and also loss of the ability to speak. The question “Who are you?” keeps coming back obsessively, but it is here, in the hospital, that the narrator understands that he will be free only when he discovers who he is. It seems that the hospital stay is a turning point in the narrator’s life, a kind of rebirth. For the first time in his life, he understands that all his life was a dream, an utopia, and that he was wrong in accepting the ideas and attitudes imposed to him by others. The narrator emerges now as a changed man with his own personality, who is no longer ashamed of who he is and of his origins. I believe that the act of eating a yam in the street (a thing that he would never have done before thinking it is not proper and shameful) is the act that marks his breaking away with the stereotypes in his mind about how blacks should behave in society.
After collapsing in the street, the narrator is taken to the home of Mary Rambo, a kind woman who lets him live for free in Harlem and nurtures his sense of black heritage. By means of introducing Mary into the story, Ellison provides to the reader another belief about how blacks should behave. The woman thinks that it’s up to the

black youth to do things that are
“a credit to the race”
(255), to fight and move the entire race “a little higher”, not only achieve personal enrichment. Mary is a constant reminder to the narrator that achievements are expected of him.
Consequently, the spokesperson job he accepts from a political organization called the brotherhood is his way of showing his gratitude to Mary and repaying her for her kindness. However, once he joins the Brotherhood, the hero is forced to break all connections with his family and Mary, and is even given a new name, a new identity.
Although this time the hero is set on doing his work and at the same time being his true self, there is a point in the book where he confesses:
“There were two of me: the old self that slept a few hours at night and dreamed sometimes of my grandfather and Bledsoe and Brockway, and Mary, the self that flew without wings and plunged from great heights; and the new public self that spoke for the Brotherhood and was becoming so much more important than the other that I seemed to run a foot race against myself.”( 380)
Thus, it seems that it was inevitable for the author to lose part of his identity, in an organization dominated by such prominent figures such as Brother Jack or Tod
Clifton. As a matter of fact, Ellison uses Brother Jack, the leader of the Brotherhood, to point out the failure of abstract ideologies to address the real plight of African
Americans and other victims of society. At first, Jack seems compassionate, intelligent and helpful, a real godsend to the narrator to him he gives money, a job, and, seemingly, a way to help his people fight against prejudice. But as the story progresses, it becomes clear that the narrator is just as invisible to Jack as he is to everyone else.
Jack sees him not even as a person, not to mention as a “brother”, but only as a tool for the advancement of the Brotherhood’s goals. It eventually becomes clear to the narrator that Jack shares the same racial prejudice as the rest of the white American society, and when the brotherhood’ s focus changes, Jack abandons the black community without regret.
As a matter of fact, the narrator discovers that Jack has a glass eye, his literal blindness symbolizing in my opinion how his solid commitment to the Brotherhood’s ideology has blinded him, metaphorically, to the suffering of the blacks. He tells the

narrator:
“We do not shape our policies to the mistaken and infantile notions of the man in the street. Our job is not to ask them what they think but to tell them!”
(473).
In fact, throughout the book, Jack explains the Brotherhood’s goals in terms of abstract ideologies. He tells the narrator in Chapter Fourteen that the group works for a better world for all people and that the organization is striving to remedy the effects of
“too many people being dispossessed by their heritage”
Moreover, he and the other brothers attempt to make the hero’s speeches more scientific, injecting them with abstractions and jargon, in order to distance them from the hard realities that the narrator seeks to expose. And the narrator gets so much involved in his work, that when he is interviewed by a magazine, he seems to be under the spell of the brothers’ ideology:
“Individuals don’t count for much; it’s what the group wants, what the group does. Everyone here submerges his personal ambitions for the common achievement”
(397)
One of the most memorable black characters that the narrator comes into contact with while he is a member of the Brotherhood is Ras the Exhorter, a powerful figure who seems to embody Ellison’s fears for the future of the civil rights battle in
America. Ras’ name, which literally means “prince” in one of the languages of
Ethiopia, sounds simultaneously like “race” and “Ra”, the Egyptian sun god 10 . These allusions capture the essence of thee character: as a passionate black nationalist, Ras is obsessed with the idea of race; as a charismatic leader, he has a kind of god-like powers in the novel. Ras’ guiding philosophy, radical at the time the noel was published, states that blacks should cast off the oppression and prejudice by destroying the ability of white men to control them.
Therefore, Ras openly expresses his disapproval towards the brotherhood, thinking that an alliance between the whites and the blacks can never work, as the whites are wicked and treacherous. The only member of the Brotherhood whom he admires is Tod Clifton, who he thinks would be charismatic leader of the African
Americans if he breaks free from the Brotherhood:
“Brothers are the same colour; how
10 Ra was the Egyptian sun god. The early Egyptians believed that he created the world, and the rising sun was, for them, the symbol of creation. The daily cycle, as the sun rose, then set only to rise again the next morning, symbolized renewal and so Re was seen as the paramount force of creation and master of life.

the hell you call these white men brothers? (…) We sons of Mama Africa, you done forget”
(370).
Indeed, Clifton is one of the most charismatic black members of the brotherhood. He is passionate, handsome, articulate, and intelligent. He eventually parts with the organization, though it remains unclear whether a falling-out has taken place, or whether he simply became disillusioned with the group. He begins selling
Sambo dolls in the street, seemingly both perpetrating and mocking the offensive stereotype of the lazy and servile slave that the dolls represent.
Actually, the Sambo doll and the coin bank that the hero finds in Mary’s home, are symbols that serve similar purposes in the novel, each representing degrading black stereotypes and the damaging power of prejudice. The coin bank, portraying a grinning black slave that eats coins embodies the idea of the good slave who ingratiates himself with white men for trivial rewards. This stereotype literally follows the narrator, for even after he has smashed the bank and tried to discard the pieces, various characters seem to return to him the paper in which the pieces are wrapped. Additionally, my onviction is that the statue’s swallowing of coins mirrors the behaviour of the black young men in the “battle royal” in Chapter One, when they scrambled to collect fake gold coins on an electrified carpet.
Furthermore, the Sambo doll is made in the image of the Sambo slave, who, according to white stereotype, is very lazy and yet submissive. Moreover, as a dancing doll, it represents the negative stereotype of the black entertainer who laughs and sings for whites.
Ironically, the Sambo doll brings death to Tod Clifton, who apparently did not have a permit to sell his wares in the street. Tod is shot after being accosted by a white policeman, with the narrator and others watching. By organizing a funeral for Tod, the narrator angers the members of the Brotherhood, as they considered Clifton a traitor.
This leads to an argument between Invisible Man and Brother Jack, who finally confesses that he sees people as nothing more than mere objects, tools. This discussion is the moment when the narrator finally changes, and understands that
“Jack, and
Norton, and Emerson merge into one single white figure. They were very much the

same, each attempting to force his picture of reality upon me and neither giving a hoot in hell for how things looked to me” (505)
So far, the narrator’s innocence prevented him from recognizing the truth behind others’ errant behaviour, remaining extremely vulnerable to the identity that society forces upon him as an African American. But now, I believe that the narrator finally realizes the extent to which his social roles limit him from discovering his individual identity. For the first time, the narrator acknowledges his invisibility and decides to use it as a position from where he can exert power over the others, coming back, ironically, to his grandfather’s advice.
As a matter of fact, the narrator first uses the invisibility mask after his falling out with the Brotherhood, in Chapter Twenty-Two. He becomes even more invisible in
Chapter Twenty-Three, when, escaping Ras’s men, he disguises himself behind dark glasses and a hat, unintentionally inducing others to mistake him for the obscure
Rinehart. Actually, the act of wearing a mask has been often seen as an African-
American technique on both the literal and symbolic level. According to Alessandra
Lorini, “hiding real feelings could part of the experience of <being a problem>, as
W.E.B. DuBois put it, or part of learning <the weight of white people in the world>, in
James Baldwin’s words, or a response to the discovery that <the enemy was everywhere, on the streets, on the job, in the school>, as Richard Wright observed. The distrust and suspicion of the whites in general made the mask a permanent shield in black experience and a means of social mobility for many blacks.” (153).
Finally, in Chapter Twenty-Five, the narrator retreats underground. At first, he is forced to hide in order to protect himself from policemen during the riot, but he ends up seeing this retreat as a means of discovering his identity, as he comes to think that it is worthless to love in a world for which he is invisible anyway because of prejudices.
However, in the act of telling the story the narrator comes to realize the dangers of his individuality: while it blocks others’ attempts to define him, it also blocks his own attempts to define and express himself. Thus, he concludes his story determined to honour his own complexity rather than subdue it in the interest of a group or ideology
Although the narrator initially embraces his invisibility in an attempt to throw off the limiting nature of stereotype, in the end he finds this tactic too passive.

Consequently, he decides to emerge from his underground “hibernation”, to make his own contribution to society as a complex individual
: “(…) even an invisible man has a socially responsible role to play” (581) . Thus, he will attempt to exert his power on the world outside of society’s system of prescribed roles. Only by making proactive contributions to society he will force others to acknowledge him, to acknowledge his existence of beliefs and behaviours outside their prejudiced expectations.
All in all, my opinion is that the odyssey which the narrator looks back on takes place on many levels. His journey is geographic, social, historical, and philosophical.
When he is still at the beginning of his quest, he dreams that he finds inside his briefcase an envelope containing numerous smaller envelopes, the last of which contains the message “Keep This Nigger Boy Running.” It is only at the end, when he burns al the contents of the real briefcase that he can start to control his own life. Up to this point, his movements are really controlled from the outside. While he tries to escape prejudice on an individual level, the narrator encounters other blacks who attempt to prescribe a defense strategy for all African Americans. Actually, each presents a theory about the supposed right way to be black in America and tries to outline how blacks should act in accordance with this theory. Furthermore, those preaching these ideas believe that anyone who acts contrary to their prescriptions betrays the race. Ultimately, however, the narrator finds that such theories only counter stereotype with stereotype and replace one limiting role with another.
Thus, early in the novel, the narrator’s grandfather explains his belief that I order to undermine racism blacks should exaggerate their servility to whites. Dr.
Bledsoe thinks that blacks can best achieve success by working industriously and adopting the manners of speech of whites. On the other hand, Ras the Exhorter thinks that blacks should rise up and take their freedom by destroying whites. All these conceptions arise from within the African American community itself. Yet, the novel implies that they ultimately prove as dangerous as white people’s racist stereotypes. By seeking to define their identity within a race in too a limited way, black figures such as
Bledsoe and Ras aim to empower themselves, but ultimately undermine themselves.
Instead of exploring their own identities, as the narrator struggles to do throughout the book, Ras and Bledsoe relegate themselves and their people to patterned roles.

Actually, what these men do is consider treacherous anyone who attempts to act outside their patterns of blackness. But it is my conviction that as blacks who seek to restrict the behaviour of the black American community as a whole, it is men like these who most profoundly betray their people.
Actually, it seems that the very pattern of the narrator’s life is one of constraint and eviction; he is alternately confined and dispossessed. We can easily notice this by looking at his experience in the college, the factory, the hospital. However, these experiences are not meaningless for the author, who thus discovers that every institution is bent on processing and programming the individual in a certain way.
However, his final discovery is that if a man does not have a place in any of the social structures, the danger is that he might fall into chaos.

In his book Black Culture and Black Consciousness , Lawrence Levine evokes an aspect in Ellison’s life that had a powerful impact on his writing: his childhood in
Oklahoma, in the 1920s. Every autumn, during the cotton-picking season, some of
Ellison’s classmates went with their parents to work in the cotton fields and Levine quotes Ellison’s confessions of always feeling a bit of envy:
“They came back with such wonderful stories. And it wasn’t the hard work that they stressed, but the continuous playing, the eating, the dancing and the singing. And they brought back jokes, old Negro jokes- not those about Negroes by whites- and they always returned with Negro folk stories which I’ve never heard before and which couldn’t be found in any book (…) This was something to affirm, and I felt there was a richness in them. ” (Levine, 368).
In addition to this source, Ellison absorbed the folklore from the elders, as the suffering of the blacks gave birth to a need for a folklore that would express both the hostilities and the aspirations, allowing them to transcend their situation.
The novel Invisible Man is actually a living proof of the influence that black folklore had on Ellison, and moreover, a tribute that the writer brings to the African-
American culture. Practically, this tradition includes the blues, spirituals, sermons of southern ministers, folktales, street language, colloquial speech of southern blacks like
Jim Trueblood, the wisdom of Mary Rambo and the traditional play upon words. What
Ellison does is in fact establish the place of Black culture in American society and proving the prospects that accompany marginal life in the modern world, showing however the inappropriateness of neo-African nationalism.

One aspect of African American folklore that Ellison employs in the novel and that the reader can notice from the very beginning is the blues. In the Prologue, we see the narrator in his underground home, listening to Louis Armstrong’s “What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue?”
. Referring to this song, Ellison conveys a sense of hardship faced by the African-Americans. The way Steve C. Tracy emphasized in The Blues
Novel , the blues is
“most often associated with sadness, a sadness crucially related to
African American experiences in slavery (…) Like the blues, Invisible Man is a first person reflective lament- turned celebration through the creative force of the speaker”
(Tracy, 133). The word play in the title of Armstrong’s song is very clever, as it refers in one sense to the speaker’s skin colour (black) and to sadness (typically suggested by the colour blue), and also, on another level, to the bruising that the African-American had to endure.
In particular, the protagonist finds that blues expresses a sense of duality. In the case of Trueblood, the black man who committed incest out of which a baby was born, it is after he sings the blues that he accepts his responsibility, and thus, according to
Steven C. Tracy, it seems that “the blues offers a dose of reality that reminds him of his fallibility on the one hand, and his need to persevere and take care of business on the other” (Tracy, 134)
Another character that demonstrates the power of the blues is Peter Wheatstraw, the “Devil’s only son-in-law”. Just like Trueblood, Wheatstraw discovered by means of the blues a kind of detachment in anguish, a way to balance pain with humour, the tragic with comic. Actually, Wheatstraw has a magical power in his voice that is steeped in folklore and enables him to
“whistle a three-toned chord” and utters mysterious and strange
“sphinx-like ” riddles (177). Moreover, as Tracy emphasized,
“Wheatstraw demonstrates for the Invisible Man the value of the folk tradition in passing on the wisdom of the elders, the advantages of wariness and improvisation and the use of creativity to combat the narrow or invisible identities allotted to the African
Americans in urban America”
(Tracy, 134). Practically, it is by means of the blues that
Wheatstraw in a way creates himself, chooses a persona that
“will help him negotiate his way through the world”
(Tracy, 135), one that embraces the African American

tradition. Even the lyric that he sings presents the folk tradition dealing with one of protagonist’s main faults: the inability to look beneath the surface.
Actually, Wheatstraw attributes his natural talents to being born “ a seventh son of a seventh son”
(144), which, according to African-American folk beliefs is a sign of supernatural powers. Moreover, this sentence echoes W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote in
The Souls of Black Folk :
“The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world”
(45) Being a seventh son becomes a curse as it renders the black Americans unseen (the veil signifies the colour line), yet it is also a blessing due to the “second sight”, which refers to the spiritual vision.
Moreover, Ellison uses Wheatstraw as a way to illustrate the colloquial language of African Americans. The Negro dialect is exuberant, and its overwhelming energy is very well reflected in Peter Wheatstraw’s laughing pronouncement of :
“I’maseventhsonofaseventhsonbawnwithacauloverbotheyesandraisedonblackcat boneshighjohntheconquerorandgreasygreens”
This also brings to mind the cheerfulness of Peter’s song , where words such as
“monkee”, “maaad”, or “Legs, legs” evoke a lusty vitality:
“She’s got feet like a monkeeee
Legs
Legs, Legs like a maaad.”
Apart from the characters of Trueblood and Wheatstraw, Ellison also uses other elements of the blues I his novel, including references to various blues songs. For instance, Mary Rambo sings
“Back Water Blues”
, while in Chapter Twenty-Three the reader encounters a fragment of the blues song
“Jelly, Jelly”
, and in the same chapter a woman is described as playing “boogie woogie” in church.
Like the blues, jazz is also felt in the story of the Invisible Man, especially keeping in mind that the jazz player is alone, but is also part of a group. In particular, the Prologue and Epilogue mark the novel as the protagonists’ speechmaking act that

however is juxtaposed with speeches of other blacks and whites. As in jazz, the narrator’s account does not seek to drown out other voices or speeches but in fact tries to incorporate them.
The Blacks’ discovery of the fluid self, so perfectly expressed by means of the blues, the free self that that yet belongs to a collective ethnic life is an idea that Ellison suggests all throughout the novel. Furthermore, the narrator tries to imply that racial distinctions are unnatural, and that black and white share an American identity. This idea is clearly enacted in the novel in the scene where the rioters dress up in white men’s clothes. Dressing up with hats, coats, boots, and the blonde wigs that they have taken from the stores during the riot indicate in fact the common identity of blacks and whites.
In this context, Ras’ distinctively African way of dressing is misguided, as “it does nothing more than deny in fact the claim to Americannes that compliments the sense of ethnic life”
(Shinn, 260) This happens because a paramount idea in Ellison’s novel is tat ethnicity is not separative, but it embraces the mutual flow of influences.
Another aspect of the African American folklore that Ellison takes up in his novel is the figure of the Black trickster and his techniques of disguise on both the physical and the moral level. The act wearing a mask has often been seen as a survival technique, a
“form of self defense born out of slavery and a response to the permanent possibility of conflict in black and white relations
” (Lorini, 150). The suspicion and contempt of the whites made the mask a permanent shield in black experience and even a means of mobility. According to Alessandra Lorini,
“hiding real feelings could part of the experience of <being a problem>, as W.E.B. DuBois put it, or part of learning
<the weight of white people in the world>, in James Baldwin’s words, or a response to the discovery that <the enemy was everywhere, on the streets, on the job, in the school>, as Richard Wright observed. The distrust and suspicion of the whites in general made the mask a permanent shield in black experience and a means of social mobility for many blacks.” (153).
However, referring to Ellison, although he applauds the skill of masking and role playing, he does not regard this technique only as a deliberate survival tactic or a means of subversion, as it happens in the case of Bledsoe, and the veteran at the Golden

Day, respectively. Ellison repeatedly illustrates that role-playing in fact shows shallowness and blindness, and, moreover, the fact that this can only offer illusory, fragile authority, and this is obvious especially in Bledsoe’s case.
With respect to the narrator, masking gives a sense of inner freedom, as disguise develops into a fluid art of self-expansion and exploring new areas of being.
Wearing a mask can bring invisibility and namelessness, and this can give birth to unlimited alternatives of being. Actually, this is the protagonist’s exciting realization at the end. In part, this is hinted in his grandfather’s memorable advice:
“Son. After I’m gone I want you to keep up the good fight… Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agee ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or burst wide open.”
(17). In the old man’s words, the suggestion of duplicity and sabotage pales beside the idea of a freer life, without any fixed role or identity.
However, this does not always happen. Bledsoe’s behaviour and mentality is a source of neither freedom nor self-discovery, as he is too taken with immediate concerns, such as personal status and advancement, to seek new horizons of being.
Another trickster in the novel is B.P. Rinehart, who despite always being referred to and spotted, never actually appears. He is the master of carnival disguise, and in one of his many masquerades is a “spiritual technologist”, who has a special way station in
“New Orleans, the home of mystery”
(455). Actually, Rinehart seems to embody “the Southern black preacher, hoo-doo priest and practitioner all in one, claiming to See all, tell all, Cure all, and promises to reveal hidden secrets with prophetic vision.”
(Shinn, 250). He practically seems to be omnipresent and omnipotent, virtually accepted by all. It is obvious that Rinehart intimately knows the black community to which he belongs- his costumes, masks, shouts- and, just like Peter
Wheatstraw,
“can use this cultural heritage to assume a role that crosses into the supernatural.”
(Shinn,250)
However, just like Bledsoe’s pragmatic way of thinking prevents his disguise from being a source of true identity, Rinehart’s numerous masks do not suggest independence, but only greed and opportunism. His extravagant roles are hollow, devoid of purpose, or a sense of inner being.

In both Rinehart’s and Wheatstraw’s case, Ellison lays certain emphasis on the effect their voice produces. In fact, according to Cristopher Shinn, this was a frequent topic in the African-American folklore- that of the power of the disembodied voice.
Ellison refers to the narrator’s voice as “disembodied” and “taunting”, which proves its spiritual qualities, while the voice itself has the power to mesmerize
“as if by magic”
(Introduction, xvii). Rinehart masters the voice of divinity, like his deacon, who leads the congregation in prayers:
“His voice rose and fell in a rhythmical, dream-like recital-part enumeration of earthly trials undergone by the congregation, part rapt display of vocal virtuosity, part appeal to God.”
(496) The congregation, swayed by his prayer and carried away by the gospel music, begins to
“shout in the unknown tongue”
.
For Invisible Man, the “whole scene quivered vague and mysterious, in the green light
”(498) In Cristopher Shinn’s opinion , “By reclaiming his African American cultural heritage, and bringing it to bear on his wider American experiences, the Invisible Man, likewise discovers his own taunting, disembodied voice and the magical powers of invisibility that are available to him” (258)
On the whole, in Invisible Man Ellison celebrated black life, with its folklore, blues, and carnivalesque traditions, instead of viewing the African- Americans simply as tragic figures in the American social drama. This happens because as Ellison himself wrote in Shadow and Act ,
“true novels, even the most pessimistic and bitter, rise out of an impulse to celebrate human life and therefore are ritualistic and ceremonial at their core”
(114). In his essay Masquerade, Magic and Carnivalesque in Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man , Cristopher Shinn emphasizes that
“America’s pleasure attractions, carnival amusements and carnival festivals invite a world of play that substantially includes magic, the occult, carnival-masquerade and spirit possession.” (247).
Practically, it is an acknowledged fact that masks, disguises are in fact devices that make visible what has been hidden, even unconscious. Shinn emphasized that:
“Normally enforced divisions can be symbolically crossed in the numinous spaces of carnival, and the social taboos associated with race and mysticism can be entertained and given expression in a collective realm of fear and fantasy, revelation and masquerade (…) Ellison’s Invisible Man engages these forms of carnival in relation to

his principal guiding metaphor, namely invisibility and disappearing act, unseen object, and clairvoyance” (247)
All in all, together with the different prejudices and stereotypes that existed inside and outside the black community, the different ways of African American thinking and acting, the elements of black folk that Ellison cleverly introduces throughout the novel, complete the picture of the African American life that the novel renders and the idea of African American individuality. With the publication of
Invisible Man in 1952, Ralph Ellison brought to the American Negro novel a dignity ever achieved before. For the first time, a black writer was able to overcome the self- consciousness of a minority culture, to realize the opportunities for greater fulfillment that exist in borderland experience.
Ellison's view was that the African-American culture and sensibility was far from the downtrodden, unsophisticated picture presented by writers, sociologists and politicians, both black and white. He posited instead that blacks had created their own traditions, rituals, and a history that formed a cohesive and complex culture that was the source of a full sense of identity. When the protagonist in Invisible Man comes upon a yam seller on the streets of Harlem and remembers his childhood in a flood of emotion, his proclamation "I yam what I yam!" is Ellison's expression of embracing one's culture as the way to freedom.
By depicting the richness and beauty of African American culture and tradition,
Ellison establishes in fact the essential place of Black culture in American society. For
Ellison, unlike the protest writers and later black separatists, America did offer a context for discovering authentic personal identity; it also created a space for African-
Americans to invent their own culture. And in Ellison's view, black and white culture were inextricably linked, with almost every facet of American life influenced and impacted by the African-American presence -- including music, language, folk mythology, clothing styles and sports. Moreover, he felt that the task of the writer is to
"tell us about the unity of American experience beyond all considerations of class, of race, of religion." In this Ellison was ahead of his time and out of step with the literary

and political climates of both black and white America; his views would not gain full currency until the 1980s.

Ellison’s life-long receptivity to the multicolored culture that surrounded him, beginning in Oklahoma City, served him well in creating a new take on literary modernism in Invisible Man.
The novel makes reference to African-American folktales, songs, the blues, jazz- much as T.S Eliot and James Joyce had referenced classical
Western and Eastern civilizations in Waste land and Ulysses. An added difference for
Ellison was that his modernist narrative was also a vehicle for inscribing his own black identity, as well as creating a road map for anyone experiencing themselves as
“invisible”, unseen. Time magazine essayist Roger Rosenblatt would say: “Ralph
Ellison taught me what it is to be an American.”
On a simple level, Invisible Man is a novel about race in America, about the way in which black people suffer from the prejudice of white people and from the cruelty of other blacks that want to please the whites. In fact, bearing in mind the tradition of the “Talking Book” that I presented in the first chapter of this paper, it would have been impossible for Ralph Ellison as an African- American writer not to inscribe his own authentic black voice in the novel.
In the essay Shadow and Act Ellison describes the elements that shape the identity of every African-American:
“What makes you a Negro is having grown up under certain cultural conditions, of having undergone an experience that shapes your culture. There is a body of folklore, a certain sense of American history. There is our psychology and the peculiar circumstances under which we have lived. There is our cuisine, though we don't admit it, and our forms of expression. I speak certain idioms; this is also part of the concord that makes me a Negro”

When writing Invisible Man , Ellison was very careful not to miss any of these elements so as the picture of the black man to be as accurate and genuine as possible.
This paper closely observes this quotation, as I have tried to lay emphasis on each element that plays a part in shaping the African-American identity.
Thus, Chapter Three of this paper discusses the circumstances, the social and political experience that left their marks on the personality of every black man in
America. It is my conviction that the sense of alienation, of displacement that characterizes the narrator could have its origin in the perpetual poverty and humiliation that blacks and the Invisible man himself had to suffer in the South. In an early dream he finds inside his briefcase an envelope which contains numerous smaller envelopes, the last of which contains the simple message “Keep This Nigger-Boy Running”, and only at the end, after burning the contents of the real briefcase, he can start to control his own life. Moreover, Invisible Man’s experience of communism is essential for the discovery of his identity, as it is in the Brotherhood that the narrator understands that he is truly invisible because of prejudiced thinking.
Further on in the analysis of African-American individuality, Chapter Four focuses on what Ellison calls “our psychology”, that is the Negro way of thinking and the stereotypes that exist within the black community itself, the prejudiced thinking of the very black men. Apart from the presentation of the psychology of the hero, which is of paramount importance, Ellison offers the reader insights into other characters’ way of thinking as well, by presenting their theories on the supposed right way to be black. I considered that including in my paper presentations of characters such as Bledsoe,
Brother Jack, or Ras the Exhorter would offer a closer and deeper insight in the ways of thinking of the black community. Moreover, such characters prove that Ellison did employ have what Bellow called “a Negro way of going to the problem”, that is a subjective approach on the racial issue.
Chapter Four was also an attempt to prove that Bledsoe’s theory that blacks should act submissive and Ras’ belief that blacks should rise up and take their freedom are as dangerous as white people’s stereotypes. As blacks who seek to restrict the behaviour of the black American community as a whole, it is men like these who most profoundly betray their people. It is commonsensical that the beliefs of the African-

American community cannot be reduced to the theories of characters such as Ras, or
Bledsoe, but we cannot discard the validity of these ideas and their actual existence within the black community. In fact, it has been discussed that the character Ras the
Exhorter reminds of Marcus Gravey, a Jamaican-born black nationalist who was influential in early 1920s. Like Ras, Garvey was a charismatic racial separatist with a love of flamboyant costumes who advocated black pride and argued against integration with whites.
However, it was one last element that was missing in order for the picture of the
African-American identity to be complete: “the body of folklore”. Mentioning from the early beginning that the narrator is listening to Lois Armstrong’s What Did I Do (To Be so Black and Blue) , Ellison announces in fact that his novel is a tribute to African-
American folklore. He believed that African-American culture was far from the unsophisticated picture presented by writers and sociologists of both races, and decided to show that blacks created their own traditions, rituals, and history that was the source of a full sense of identity.
Yet, despite the presentation of all these aspects of African-American life, Ellison did not want to use literature to make social comments, to victimize his fellow African-Americans. Actually, the symbols of black and white are used in a more complex fashion, as Ellison’s intention is to show that black and white cultures are inextricably linked. The idea that the reader is left with after reading Invisible Man is that in Ellison’s novel ethnicity is not separative, but it embraces the mutual flow of influences.
Ellison understood that the task of a writer is to
“tell us about the unity of
American experience beyond all considerations of class, of race, of religion.”
Believing in a
“black and white fraternity
” (xxii), Ellison considers that the hero of
Invisible man was both black and white, the way the very name given to this racial minority shows (African-American). In fact, Armstrong’s blues seems to express perfectly this idea:
“ I’m white inside
But that don’t help my case
Cause I can’t hide

What’s in my face.
How will it end?
Ain’t got a friend.
My only sin Is in my skin
What did I do
To be so black and blue?”
It is my conviction that the ethnic theme in Invisible Man leads to an everexpanding idea of self. The novel opens and closes with the protagonist in his underground cell, presented, as it were in his inner space. He has symbolically returned to the center of being, to the dynamism and power of Blackness, separate from the outer world from which he has come, and to which he is preparing to return. His selfhood is not frozen or static but fluid, constantly shaping and reshaping. It shifts from a sense of “I,” of being African-American, in the Prologue, to a sense of “you” and “I,” white and African-American, American, in the Epilogue.
Invisible Man and the essays Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory had a serious impact on people’s thinking about race, identity, and what it means to be
American. Due to the power of the three books, Ellison both accelerated America’s literary work and helped defined and clarify arguments about race in this country.
Moreover, Ellison’s outlook was universal: he saw the predicament of blacks in
America and used it as a metaphor for universal human challenge of finding a viable identity in a chaotic and sometimes indifferent world. Fifty years after the publishing of
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s voice continues to speak to all of us.
After finishing any critical analysis, on inevitably feels that there is something left to deal with, other aspect to tackle upon, feeling which, no matter how distressing it is, is ultimately valid, because nobody can claim an exhaustive view on any given topic. Still, what is important about any such critical attempt is the rate of originality of the ideas and opinions on the chosen subject. Moreover, despite the fact that this paper does not pretend to have exhausted the subject, I have tried to approach the subject under discussion from all the perspectives I considered necessary, always with reference to the text of Invisible Man.
All this being said, I would like to end my paper with an excerpt from an article published in the New York Times by the essayist Roger Rosenblatt, which presents the

importance of Invisible Man in the history of American literature in very few but suggestive words:
“All his life after "Invisible Man," Ellison was dogged by critics to write a second novel. One version was said to have been in the works when he died, another lost in a fire. But it's hard to imagine Ellison having anything more valuable to say after exhorting America to recognize the invisible. “

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