Analysis Of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison’s picaresque novel Invisible man follows the narrated journeys of a young African American man in the early twentieth century who remains nameless throughout the story. His episodic recollections of his travels from the South of the United States of America to the North portrays the struggles of not only him, but most African Americans at the time, in that it encompasses the struggles of a culture and race that is predominantly shunned and made to feel invisible by the majority of society. Through the narrator’s recollection of episodes in this journey, Ellison develops a social dialogue which expresses the consequences of rendering an entire race ‘invisible’ to aspects of basic humanity.

The introduction of the novel is provided strangely with a prologue, emphasising the circular nature of the text which follows. Ellison’s use of an unnamed narrator develops the reader’s first encounter with the distortions of identity in the text. Encompassing further aspects of invisibility throughout the prologue, the first chapter which follows it deals with the first episode which will be examined in this essay, the sinisterly named ‘battle royal’. As the narrator introduces the episode, he describes himself as in “those pre-invisible days”, before he is thrust into this violent and chaotic event known as the battle royal. Influenced by the views of Booker T Washington, the narrator still believes in a socially cohesive society. Ironically, the following events which