Violence In Invisible Man

“Because I am not a nigger. I am a man.” With these words, author James Baldwin casts off the identity that was given to him by white culture, and embraces a view of violence that was most similar to Ralph Ellison’s, the author of Invisible Man, idea of violence. Ellison’s view of violence was all-encompassing, recognizing that violence took many more forms than just physical violence. Some of the worst kinds of violence are those that one cannot even see, like microaggressions. Mark Twain was never able to fully understand this idea, as he was a perpetrator of verbal violence himself. However, both Twain and Ellison were masters of using violence to cast a light onto society, revealing all of the deep dark secrets that were hidden even from

Ralph Ellison understood that violence is far more than simply hurting another person physically. Violence can be committed with words, consequently, The Invisble Man had to deal with much verbal violence during the novel. This verbal violence was a constant his entire life, leading him to try and reject his culture. After deciding to resist his urges and order orange juice with toast and coffee instead of a pork chop and grits, The Invisible Man states, “It was an act of discipline, a sign of the change that was coming over me and which would return me to college a more experienced man.” The verbal violence of white people, his entire life, led him to believe that to become the best possible man, he needed to give up his culture. Ellison recognized that the microaggressions of people pile up over time, becoming this almost physical weight upon an entire culture. When a people are dehumanized for simply embracing their culture, they often will end up

The civil rights movement was just starting to ramp up, and there were two sides that ended up being in large conflict. There were people who advocated for total separation of the races, such as the Nation of Islam, and people who advocated for all people who believed in social justice to band together for the cause, such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This war of ideologies is shown through the fight between Ras the Exhorter and the Communist Brotherhood. During the fight, Clifton and the narrator talk with Ras while fighting, and Ras says, “Brothers are the same color; how the hell you call these white men brother?” The men who are with Ras reflect the Nation of Islam, trying to separate whites and blacks, and being racist against white people. Meanwhile, there were white and black members of the Communist Brotherhood, all working together to fight for equality. As the narrator responded during the fight, “Thinking like that will get you lost in the backwash of history.” While certainly not a perfect mirror of the world, Ellison used these bouts of violence to reflect the violence in America, showing not only the injustices due to physical violence, but also the fight between two ideologies that believed in the same thing: freedom. Mark Twain similarly used Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to reflect the true state of society, however, his critique of society