Identity in a Color-Conscious Society in Invisible Man Essay -- Invisi

Identity in a Color-Conscious Society in hidden Man Critics generally agree that Ralph Ellisons award winning overbold, unseeable Man, is a work of genius, broad in its appeal and universal in its meaning. Its heterogeneous themes have been stated as the geography of hell . . . the real mating of man (Morris 5), the emergence of Negro personality from the fixed boundaries of southern breeding (Bone 46), and the search for human and national individuality (Major 17). Rich in symbolic representation and cleverly interwoven, Invisible Mans linear plot structure, told from the first-person, limited point of view, and close in by the Everyman protagonist from his subterranean home, follows the narrator in his search for identity in a color-conscious society whose constricting social and cultural credulity produces an accelerated pattern of violence and oppression which attempts to efface the narrator of his individuality, olibanum assigning him an invisible non-identity with in America. The underlying force in Invisible Man is the atmosphere of America that begins in the early 1900s of the segregated recondite south, and ends in the Norths predominately black neighborhood of Harlem during the 1930s. As critic Marcus Klein states, Everything in the novel has clarified this point that the bizarre accident that has led the Invisible Man to relegate up residence in an abandoned coal cellar is no accident at all, that the underworld is his inevitable home, that given the social facts of America, two invisibility and what he calls his hibernation are his permanent condition (109). Ellisons protagonist, the effaced narrator, is a small African-American male from the segregated deep south, who b... ...iction New Studies in the African-American Novel since 1945. Ed. A. Robert Lee. London Vision Press, 1980. 54-73. Klein, Marcus. Ralph Ellison. After Alienation American Novels in Mid-Century. Cleveland World Pub., 1964. 71-146. Langman, F.H. Reconsidering Invisible Man. The Critical revue. 18 (1976) 114-27. Lieber, Todd M. Ralph Ellison and the Metaphor of Invisibility in Black Literary Tradition. American Quarterly. Mar. 1972 86-100. Major, Clarence. American Poetry Review. Nov/Dec. (1973) 17. Margolies, Edward. History as Blues Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man Native Sons A Critical con of Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors. Philadelphia J.B. Lippincott Co., 1968. 127-48. Morris, Wright. The World Below. The New York Times Book Review 13 Apr.1952 5.