Themes In Invisible Man

RALPH ELLISON’S INVISIBLE MAN: A CULTURAL RESISTANCE

Amrutha T V

Guest Faculty

Sreekrishna College, Guruvayur

ABSTRACT: African-American writers of fiction have always been pre occupied with racial themes and cultural legacies. This is due to their history of enslavement and colonization. The variety of races thrown together has created a melting-pot and the writers often tend to focus on racial prejudice and colour hierarchies. They have been subject to some of the worst fonts of physical, political, social and educational deprivation. It is comparable to the Dalit and tribal situation in India. Many African-American writers are tend to examine the link between race and politics. The experiences of deprivation are often manifested in their

But, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man cannot be classified simply as a novel by an American Negro about American Negroes. It retains a broad political focus on both racial consciousness and national culture by redefining the terms of social reality. Ralph Ellison’s style of narration decidedly illuminates the African-American culture. He is profoundly original in putting his sophisticated technique and literary education to serve his vision of the racial and human condition in

Ellison‘s fiction is concerned with people who, in terms of their ancestry, are displaced, dispossessed and separated from their identity and their cultural legacy or “history”. But there is a strong conviction throughout the work that the identity and “history” should not be considered stable or essentialist. There are imaginative boundaries and limits which are perceived as signifying spaces in which cultural, political and economic powers are contested, negotiated or reaffirmed. This is not to say that there is no sympathy for the past; in the context of the instability and unpredictability, the present becomes a locus for an imagined community. A fantasy of identity and belonging turns on the notions of origins, roots, unarticulated histories and shared