Examples Of Juxtaposition In Invisible Man

Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison was a man with a love of individuality. He was a man of vision and a radical thinker. His novel, Invisible Man, rattled the confining prison bars of racism and prejudice. Through his narrator, the Invisible Man, Ellison guides the reader on a path of tribulations. His labyrinthine story shows readers the untold truths of racism, and the blindness caused by the corrupt power structure of society. The cryptic journey of the invisible man leads the readers, to a ubiquitous message, in which personal identity is everything. “Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states. America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain” (Ellison 577). In this homiletic epilogue, Ellison’s

Ellison employs the juxtaposition, and development of characters to emphasize Invisible Man’s failure to recognize aspects of society. Many of the characters in Ellison’s novel are often so tightly wrapped in their own personal bias and beliefs that they are “blind.” The narrator in his naivety, is unperceptive to the Brotherhood’s real motives, the truth about people (i.e. Dr.Bledsoe) and even to his own identity. This is best seen in the description of the Invisible Man by the veteran in the Golden Day. “... he fails to understand the simple facts of life… Already he’s learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He’s invisible, a walking personification of the Negative, the most perfect achievement of your dreams, sir! The mechanical man!” (Ellison 94) The veteran in the Golden Day, though deemed insane is in reality among the very few in the book with accurate perception of the Invisible Man, furthering the ironic inversion of Ellison’s writing. Ralph Ellison, does not just his characters to demonstrate the narrators naivety/ blindness, but also masterfully weaves in items representative of blindness through the novel. The blindfolded boxing match, the recurring motif of veils, the blind Homer A. Barbee and Brothers Jack’s missing eye are all emblematic of Ellison’s message in which much of society is

In Chapter 2 of the Invisible Man the narrator sees a bronze statue of a kneeling man having a veil lifted from his eyes with the aid of a white man. Though it appears the man is helping lift the veil, the statute is unclear, thus making the message unclear. In the Invisible Man Ellison uses allusions to further his metaphors, imagery, and themes. In the sense of veils, Ellison alludes to Du Bois’s book, The souls of Black Folk in which Du Bois states that “ the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s sense through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” (Du Bois) Both Du Bois, and Ellison believe that an individual is capable of seeing by oneself, and others, but a veil based on prejudices, and racism is preventing them from being seen. Though a veil normally obscures one side of an object/person the veil in which Ellison and Du Bois write about doubly obscures, in that they allow the other to form versions of the “invisible” person, thus causing the invisible to build misconstrued versions of