Ellison's Invisible Man Research Articles

Self, Society, and Myth in Toni Morrison's Fiction

Toni Morrison's novels have attracted both popular and critical attention for their inventive blend of realism and fantasy, unsparing social analysis, and passionate philosophical concerns. The combination of social observation with broadening and allusive commentary gives her fictions the symbolic quality of myth, and in fact the search for a myth adequate to experience is one of Morrison's central themes. Because her world and characters are inescapably involved with problems of perception, definition, and meaning, they direct attention to Morrison's own ordering view and its implications. All of Morrison's characters exist in a world defined by its blackness and by the surrounding white society that both violates and denies it. The destructive effect of the white society can take the form of outright physical violence, but oppression in Morrison's world is more often psychic violence. She rarely depicts white characters, for the brutality here is less a single act than the systematic denial of the reality of black lives. The theme of invisibility is, of course, a common one in black American literature, but Morrison avoids the picture of the black person invisible in white life (Ellison's Invisible Man trying to confront passersby). Instead, she immerses the reader in the black community; the white society's ignorance of that concrete, vivid, and diverse world is thus even more striking. The constant censorship of and intrusion on black life from the surrounding society is emphasized not by specific events so much as by a consistent pattern of misnaming. Power for Morrison is largely the power to name, to define reality and perception. The world of all three novels' is distinguished by the discrepancy between name and

Race, Sex and Self: Aspects of Bildung in Select Novels by Black American Women Novelists

As in other aspects of America's literary culture, any consideration of variants in development of the Bildungsroman genre would be less textured without inclusion of works by Black women authors. While the novels of Black American male writers have been replete with scenes of initiation more typical of Western Bildungsroman tradition (i.e., the famous Battle Royal scene in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, episodic agony from familial and societal oppression in Richard Wright's Black Boy and youthful religious confessions in James Baldwin's Go Tell It On The Mountain), representative novels by Black American women writers have no similar preoccupations with adolescent recognitions. Virtually to a woman,1 they have not devoted comparable, measurable space in their works to the components traditional in Western Bildungsroman (that is according to the standards set forth by well-known scholars of the genre, Jerome Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, and Ray L. Ackerman, Bildung and Verbildung in the Prose Fiction Works of Otto Julius Bierbaum): first physical awakenings; dramatic adolescent conflicts and later reconciliation with family, religion, educational systems or national community.2 When using Bildungsroman themes these women writers did not even choose the adolescent years as appropriate frameworks for Black feminine rites of passage; nor as novelists do they concentrate on youthful recognition of racial rejection by the dominant white society. Rather, they collectively depict the Black woman's internal struggle to unravel the immense complexities of racial identity, gender definitions (in contexts of Black and not white experience), and awakening of sexual being in short to discover, direct, and recreate the self in the midst of hostile racial, sexual and other societal repression to produce a literature not confined to usual Bildung development at set chronological ages. From the first novel by a Black American woman in 1892, Frances E. W. Harper's lola Leroy: Or Shadows Uplifted, through the prolific period of the Harlem Renaissance in which several Black women writers ap-

The Ambiguities of Dreaming in Ellison's Invisible Man

66 HlIE ARTIST, Ellison has stressed, must be capable of descending I into deeper level of his consciousness, opening himself to an inner world where reason and madness mingle with bope and memory and endlessly give birth to nightmare and to dream. This inner, oneiric universe is as much province of creator as it is of the psychiatrist.2 And in Invisible Man dreams, drug-induced nightmares, and other hallucinatory states of consciousness become Ellison's province as he explores human personality and imagination in depth. A black American author penetrating, in his fiction, through socially visible persona-above all, through stereotypes and formulas which have conventionally, and delusively, defined black identity in America-Ellison becomes a surveyor of activity, dreamlike yet intense, transpiring on dark side of mind.3 He seeks a fuller understanding of human consciousness by probing its dream-plots and hallucinated images. Criticism, however, which has steadily contributed to our understanding of Ellison's novel over years, has yet to grapple satisfactorily with this dimension of his art.4

Ellison's Invisible Man: The Old Rhetoric and the New

In his article Ralph Ellison's Exhorters: The Role of Rhetoric in Invisible Man, Lloyd W. Brown defines rhetoric as self-conscious exploitation of language as a communicative medium, 1 but, although Brown's analysis is at times compelling, he does not say enough about complexity of rhetorical usage in novel. In positing that there is a formal rhetoric, which he associates with dehumanized intellectuality, and a rhetoric, the language of self-expression, 2 and in linking former with Brotherhood and latter with such characters as narrator and Ras, Brown exaggerates moral implications of two rhetorics. The dichotomy between bad formality (or what I'd prefer to consider as old rhetoric) and good spontaneity (or new rhetoric) is not so naively simple, for both have their abusers-and both can, and sometimes do, operate within a single character. Moreover, book's rhetorical situations need further study because rhetoric is, finally, more important to an understanding of novel, especially to author-reader relationship, than has been generally thought.

The Grandfather's Riddle in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

The Grandfather's Riddle in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison's Blues

Ralph Ellison's essay, Wright's Blues, is distinguished from many on Wright's work by Ellison's use of an art form indigenous to black American culture as the focal point of his critique. His understanding of the blues provides the thematic structure of this essay. A relationship is established between Wright and the blues so that his work is seen against a new background and as a part of a longstanding black American cultural tradition. The result is a fresh and sympathetic reappraisal of Richard Wright's essential contribution. The essay typifies Ellison's persistent reliance on the folk traditions of his own culture and his view of these traditions as important elements of America's overall cultural milieu. They are more than a badge of racial pride for him; they shape in a very fundamental way not only his critical and cultural theories but also the form and content of his fiction. For Ellison, Wright's autobiography, Black Boy, is among other things a blues piece, an extended blues song that deals with the real pain of life thro'ugh confrontation rather than evasion. Ellison's Invisible Man itself is rich in the folklore of black America, and several of the essays in his book, Shadow

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Female Stereotypes

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Female Stereotypes

Break and Enter to Breakaway: Scotching Modernism in the Social Novel of the American Sixties

It finally comes round that the story of fiction in this country and this century must refer almost defer to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. He said there that the end of his novel was in its beginning. But, too, a beginning came from his ending. There were energies and revealed directions in the body of the novel which were all too urgent to contain in the famous commitments of the epilogue. His novel is a perfect bridge between two generations the one the invisible man left behind and circled back toward, and the one he anticipated but from which he circled away. Indeed, the invisible man contains most of America's fictive energy. Every mode, every style that has appeared in our fiction, from naturalism through surrealism, appears in this novel; every voice, every diction that was spoken before, from Emerson through Faulkner, echoes at some point in the invisible man's language; he's been through, as he says, every single way our world was nailed down. And he ends up, almost, in hibernation.

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: "It Goes a Long Way Back, Some Twenty Years"

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: "It Goes a Long Way Back, Some Twenty Years"

"Art" and "Protest": Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man Twenty Years After

"Art" and "Protest": Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man Twenty Years After

Witnessing, or the Myth of the Global Village

readers are written in the first person? Lemuel Gulliver, Moll Flanders, Tristram Shandy, Roderick Random, David Copperfield, Pirrip, Ishmael, Huckleberry, Nick Carraway, and Ellison's Invisible Man capture audiences. One might object that I have merely been narrowly selective for my own purpose. But with a possible exception or two, the novels I mention are high among those people continue to read, and not merely graduate students of literature, but students in secondary schools and the public at large. Or consider a list of novels typical of secondary literature programs throughout the nation-presumably novels which youngsters read with some willingness: Treasure Island, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, The SeaWolf, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Steppenwolf, Demian, A Clockwork Orange. Consider also novels which students approach with some reluctance: The Scarlet Letter, Giants in the Earth, The Red Badge of Courage, The Grapes of Wrath, Hard Times, practically anything by Hardy or Sinclair Lewis-all of them third person novels. Whether they be time-honored novels which students still will read without

Racial Stereotypes in Hard Core Pornography

The Journal of Popular CultureVolume V, Issue 1 p. 221-235 In-Depth: The Comics Racial Stereotypes in Hard Core Pornography Phyllis R. Klotman, Phyllis R. Klotman Assistant Professor of Literature in the Afro-American Studies Program at Indiana University. Her articles include: “The Running Man as Metaphor in Ellison's Invisible Man,” (CLA Journal, March, 1970); An Approach to the Teaching of Black Literature, scheduled to appear this year in The CEA Critic.Search for more papers by this author Phyllis R. Klotman, Phyllis R. Klotman Assistant Professor of Literature in the Afro-American Studies Program at Indiana University. Her articles include: “The Running Man as Metaphor in Ellison's Invisible Man,” (CLA Journal, March, 1970); An Approach to the Teaching of Black Literature, scheduled to appear this year in The CEA Critic.Search for more papers by this author First published: Summer 1971 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-3840.1971.0501_221.xCitations: 2AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature VolumeV, Issue1Summer 1971Pages 221-235 RelatedInformation

Sight and Mask: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

Sight and Mask: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

Notes from a Clean, Well-Lighted Place: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

The themes of alienation and isolation are familiar enou g h in our literature; the outsider threatens to become a stock figure. But the theme of invisibility the premise that a man can stand in such a relationship with the world that his fellow humans utterly refuse to see him goes beyond even isolation, and it is this idea that Ralph Ellison explores in his only published novel, Invisible Man.' Ellison establishes a situation in which the protagonist lives in this state of invisibility and knows it. For the protagonist even to recognize that a condition of invisibility exists is a gradual and difficult task; to understand the essence of that state is both difficult and painful; and to comprehend not only that it exists, and what it means, but also that it is at the very core of his own personality, is excruciating enough to drive the hero into a hole in the ground. It is from his warm and well-lighted hole that the invisible man recounts the wild process whereby he came to understand this basic fact about himself and the world.

Stereotypes and Social Types in Ellison's Invisible Man

The literature of the first three decades of the twentieth century records directly and indirectly the rise of national society and the destruction of the local society. The very fact that so many of the most able writers of the so-called “lost generation” were ex-patriots could…be taken, not unfairly, as a direct product of the fact that while local forms of American community were being destroyed, the national community was too underdeveloped to re-incorporate the pieces. The artists were like refugees from destroyed communities1.