The Role Of Identity In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” has always been a book that can be controversial from female, black, and white perspectives. Many people may think that whites are just a form of an antagonist for the narrator, but there is more to the white characters than initially thought, or I should say less. The white characters in the novel all have something in common, and that is they all seem to be searching for some form of identity. It goes from the the “Battle Royal,” which is broad and covers many generic white characters, all the way to specific characters like Emerson, Norton, and Sybil. The way Ellison is able to accomplish this loss of identity for white characters is through his language and how he constructs scenes in the book. One of

He is the character the tells the narrator that Dr. Bledsoe has no intentions of letting the narrator back into the school. This scene with Emerson and the narrator could be seen as his entrance to the “surgical white world and is subject to surreal experiments by men probing his sense of reality,” in the words of Morris Dickstein’s “Ralph Ellison, Race, and American Culture” (page 137). This isn’t the narrator’s first close encounter with a white man, but this scene does drastically change his perspective on Dr. Bledsoe. This will eventually change his perspective on other aspects of his life; that topic is for a different

Norton’s scene with Trueblood has many allusions to white identity loss. When Norton has his conversation with Trueblood, it almost seems like he wanted to do what Trueblood did to his daughter. On page 41 of “Invisible Man” Ellison writes “his blue eyes blazing into the black face with something like envy and indignation.” The key word in that quote is “envy,” and it’s very disconcerting that Trueblood did this horrible things to his daughter and Norton envies this. This can be further seen in Norton’s description of his daughter. According to Kim and Daniel Y. “While every sentence in this highly romanticized description is intended to emphasize the chasteness of both Norton's paternal love and its object, many of those same sentences simultaneously engage in the subtle disclosure of the incestuous desire they are desperately trying to repress” (page 317). This just may seem like Norton’s way of living out his incestuous dream, but there is more to it than