Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

Throughout Invisible Man, author Ralph Ellison includes an abundance of details that demonstrate the hardships of African Americans. Many of these hardships included racist comments or implications toward the narrators and the African Americans of his time.. While Ellison describes the narrator’s impressions of the scenery and environment of New York as well as personal experiences, he utilizes the history and thoughts of an African American man to put into words the reality around him and impressing it into “Invisible Man” thereby indirectly displaying his thoughts, life and the events of his time through his story. In “Invisible Man” there are prevalent racially driven comments made by people while the narrator’s travels to New York.

Among those influenced by it was Ellison who constantly relates Jazz to the narrator, utilizing it to express his inner thoughts. According to Laid and Iman, students at Kasdi Merbah University- Ourgla, the song Black and Blue which Ellison included in “Invisible Man” is a prime of example of how Ellison utilized Jazz to express himself. The lyrics consist of a person explaining all their hardships as black and blue defining their opaqueness and darkness. According to Laid and Iman’s explanation, “ the reader can feel the humiliation, the alienation because of the racism, and the invisibility next the whites. We feel these themes from Louis Armstrong singing the jazz music, and we can feel the same themes from the novel because the writer is using jazz music in his writing” (Laid and Iman, 42). The connection between the music and the message of how difficult it is to be an African American during the 1900s is expressed throughout “Invisible Man”. Because of this Ellison consequently reveals some of his inner thoughts through the simple inclusion of a couple of lyrics that he probably listened to. The inclusion of jazz music is not bizarre due to the time in which it was written and the immense influence that it had on African Americans. Because of this, it is common to find subtle references to jazz music included in which Ellison often empowers and gives strength to African Americans. As stated by Laid and Iman, “We see that through the novel; the power of music helps the narrator to use his mentality to move from place and time to another place and time he has used some musical words… From the novel there are a lot of examples where the writer has used the word rhythm such as the following example ‘it was a though he has never paused, as though his words, reverberating writhing us, had continued their rhythmic flow through their source was for a moment (Ralph Ellison 99)”’. To African