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Consciousness In W. E. B. Dubois's Invisible Man

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It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. Yellow book p.3
- W. E. B. DuBois
William DuBois an African American scholar have coined a concept of double consciousness to describe a sensation that colored people have developed throughout years. According to DuBois, African Americans are somehow endowed with a skill that lets them view themselves from other, usually, white perspective. He argues that African Americans struggled with multi- faceted conception of self. Meaning that they were continuously trying to reconcile the two cultures that consist of one identity. …show more content…

Towards the end of the book, Bigger realized that his identity had been defined and judged without him having any word about it, thus, he had not been given a choice but to become “a monster”. In Invisible Man, however, Ellison put his character in a slightly better position. The protagonist, came to realize the trap he was in, in time, meaning that he was a black man and no other identity that he tried to take on would give him the freedom he had dreamed of. Perhaps, the fact that Invisible Man had a better idea of who he was and who he was not, was because of the different times the books were written in. When it comes to Thelonious Monk Ellison in Erasure, although he lived in the twentieth century and did not come across the same form of racism the previous two protagonists did, he did have to fight for his identity as well. Unfortunately, Monk lost the battle, as he submitted to the stereotypical image of an African American

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