Rhetoric Analysis Of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is considered as the Great American Novel, and for good reason. Within its dense six-hundred pages, Ellison depicts the life of black Americans living in the 1950s while implementing pieces that allow the audience to connect to its main ideas from any time period. One could read this book through a hundred different lenses, however for the purpose of an AP Language class, I chose to read it (and depict it in my painting) from a leitmotif analysis lens. While it may be impossible to wholly represent this work of literature in a singular nine by twelve canvas, the elements and scenes I chose to emphasize demonstrate the essential ideas seen from cover to cover. If Invisible Man was a painting, it would look something

Starting with the top left, the painting shows a hand reaching down to a pile of tokens on a carpet which mirrors the scene during the Battle Royale where the narrator is on all fours grabbing money from an electrically charged carpet. The significance of this scene is that it represents the inability for black people in America to achieve prosperity, power, or similar economic standing as white people. The narrator thinks to himself, “It seemed a whole century would pass before I would roll free, a century in which I was seared through the deepest levels of my body to the fearful breath within me and the breath seared and heated to the point of explosion” which mimics a mental shift within the narrator seen as the book progresses (Ellison 28). Racism is an overarching theme throughout the whole novel, so this event in particular stood out due to its early occurrence as it was one of the first times that the narrator experienced true American racism. He mentions the African-American inability to be equal to white Americans when he speaks of freedom and explicitly hints at his change from covert to overt violence when talking about his breath

He is outlined in gray to show he is invisible to white America as the dots of gray sit in a larger outline of plain white. The layers of black and blue relate to the song mentioned in the Prologue “What Did I Do To Be So (Black and Blue)” by Louis Armstrong and my interpretation of it; the frustration heard in the song comes from Armstrong’s blackness and inability to change that which is a very relatable feeling for the narrator, and the blue comes from within Armstrong’s self due to the repression of emotional baggage which is also very familiar to the narrator. The black of the hair of the bank and the Sambo Doll specify that these characters are meant to be racist and only pertain to black people and since black people tend to be born with black hair, that was the connection I painted. The connections of each section to the man in the middle shows how all of those events led to his blue inside because they all contributed a level of hatred and frustration that caused his inner turmoil. And finally, the lack of detail demonstrates the theme of common suffering amongst black Americans- for the same reason that the novel is titled Invisible Man and not The Invisible Man, Ellison wrote the book to connect to his audience and allow them to relate to the