Essay On The Black Struggle In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

Invisible Man: The History and Connectedness of the Character

The Black Struggle in the United States of America, dating back to the eighteenth century and before, is alive and well in the modern day. Beginning with the Atlantic Slave Trade in the eighteenth century, blacks were viewed as an inferior breed and had no civil rights- they were inhumane and barbaric. Before the Emancipation Proclamation was passed in 1863, they were property of the white man. In a governmental context, the Emancipation Proclamation brought the black community to an equal level, yet the same struggle for civil rights has been relative and extremely prominent in the twentieth century- when racism and bigotry was at an all time high (Otis). Multiple persons throughout

Ralph Ellison, author of the bildungsroman novel Invisible Man, created the character of an “invisible,” black man who tirelessly worked to better the life of others and answer the

He pieced together the persecution, the blood, the sweat, and the tears that the black community endured. Yet, more than anything, he portrayed the fact that the black man would always be viewed as “invisible.” No matter enslaved or free, the black man is just a game-piece in the world of the whites. Even with Truth’s successes, and the thousand of successes before and after her time, the black community would never be on an equal playing field in America. Ellison never directly admitted to this, yet Invisible Man’s path throughout the novel cemented the fact that even after two centuries the black man was still a second-class citizen. Even with all of the work and hardship that Invisible Man faced, he ended up in a position worse than where he began. He ended up in a “hole,” a place of darkness and despair. Ellison illustrated that he was in a state of enslavement, as he was “hurt to the point of invisibility”