Identity In Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man

Why would a man want to portray himself as invisible? Is he antisocial? Disliked? In the novel, Invisible Man, the reader will be guided through the life of an oppressed African-American man who feels “invisible”.Throughout the novel, the narrator is on a search for his true identity. In The Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison portrays the protagonist as “invisible”, which may elicit the reader’s empathy and identification. Yet less than a page later, the narrator who has approached the reader with such intimacy and openness has turned into a violent thug. This is only the first of many contradictions and complexities that the reader will observe in the narrator’s personality and his actions throughout “Invisible Man”. The narrator's shift in identity

We also learn where the author comes from and why he started writing."Invisible Man" stresses the importance to be seen. Blacks living during this era were unacknowledged and many people living during this time wanted to pretend blacks didn't exist, or that they were beneath their notice. In Saul Bellow’s criticism of The Invisible Man, we learn about why Ralph Ellison wrote the book. “For this enormously complex and difficult American experience of ours very few people are willing to make themselves morally and intellectually responsible. Consequently, maturity is hard to find” (Bellow 608). In this quote Bellow talks about Ellison’s view on societal norms on maturity. Bellow also discusses the tone Ellison adopts throughout the novel, and predominant social classes during the time. “For there is a way for Negro novelists to go at their problems, just as there are Jewish or Italian ways. Mr. Ellison has not adopted a minority tone” (Bellow 609). In an interview, Ellison explains why he pursued writing in the first place. “Actually, I turned to writing before I realized what had happened. Sometime during my high school days, it must’ve been around the eleventh grade, I had a very bad cold… I read quite a lot” (Ellison 678). He talks about an encounter that he had with his school nurse and how she told him to go to a lung care center. The doctor’s office

In adopting this approach, the reader attempts to understand how victims of systematic racism are affected by cultural perceptions of race. In Anthony Dykema’s of The Invisible Man, he does a lot of elaboration on the critical race theory. For example, he says about the protagonist, “He is “invisible” not from any lack of willed action of those around him, “simply because people refuse to see me” (Dykema 166). He talks about how people refuse to see him because of his black skin color. He says that it is their action and they are being ignorant of him. Dykema also takes mention of various social stances such as where black people live. “Social responsibility,” first of all, is precisely what the racist ‘leading white citizens’ of this Southern town desired from him, the responsibility of keeping himself in a submissive and segregated place” (Dykema 167). He mentions how, due to societal norms, blacks should be kept in segregated places. Lastly, Dykema critiques Ellison’s work by saying the most important part of society in order to move past its conservative segregated past is faith. “As Ellison envisions it, living as a true American requires faith- faith of equality and democracy when they are most out of reach, in the possibility of coming together when segregation predominates, in humans”