“To Become One And Yet Many”: Psychic Fragmentation and Aesthetic Synthesis in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

Abstract

Abstract To a great degree, the difficulty confronted in the constitution of the African-American subject is a function of the social interrelation of blacks and whites in the United States. The nature of that interrelation casts black identity necessarily as a problem, an objective never to be realized, hardly to be imagined, so that the black subject exists not so much as the negativity conventionally believed to emblematize it but rather always as potentiality unfulfilled, simultaneous promise and disappointment.1 Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) is the classic text of the problems and possibilities of black (male) identity, and in its figuration of the difficulties of the marginalized subject, it suggests the degree to which individual subjectivity generally will become problematized in the postmodern era. The unrealized nature of black identity is manifested on many levels in Ellison’s novel-in the fact, for instance, that its protagonist has no name; more complexly, the character’s very assertions of self-identity indicate his incompleteness as a subject: “I am nobody but myself,” he says at one point, and later, “I am who I am” (263). These declarations seek to gain force through their tautologousness, but their very redundancy bespeaks a line of reasoning that, in its figurative circularity, suggests nothing so much as the zero that actually represents the protagonist’s identity.