Double Consciousness In Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man

The patterns of trust and subsequent betrayal found in the Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, serve to teach lessons about what it was like for African Americans in post-slavery America, when the book is set. The Invisible Man trusts easily and naively. Yet, despite working hard, he is betrayed by the institutions and people he looks up to as role models as they exploit his expectations for their own agenda. Overall, there are four strong examples of those taking advantage and hurting the Invisible Man. With each incident, he learns a lesson about how blatantly the black population is disregarded, along with being given an object that represents the underlying racism found in a society.

James Baldwin is very explicit in his novel about the conditions of racism in the United States, and where he believes they stem from. Baldwin seems to think it is an internal, and individualized mindset that causes African Americans to fall into their ‘expected’ roles. He tells his nephew, “You can only be destroyed by believing you really are what the white world calls a nigger” (Baldwin 4). Through this quote, Baldwin is appealing to the readers pathos and making them think more deeply about how one finds their own self identity. Is much of modern racism influenced by others opinions on ourselves and on each other?

Reading a work of fiction could be seen as a quiet undemanding job, as all the reader has to do is let the narrator tell him the story while he observes. This, in fact, is not the case. A person who has read the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe will have proof that, for instance, some narrators can be very unreliable. In the short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar A. Poe, the narrator describes the events in a highly confusing way that makes the reader question what is real and what is not. The narrator, nameless and not gendered, appears to be mentally unstable even though the text begins with him questioning “How, then, am I mad?” (Poe, 691) in the first paragraph, leading the reader to believe that he’s actually sane.

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.

This use of power by white people over black individuals has caused numerous black individuals to view themselves as trapped in their own skin, which is a concept Fanon defines as “blackness”. In Frantz Fanon’s article, The Fact of Blackness, he speaks about how black people do not feel the weight of their “blackness” until they are under the scrutiny of white counterparts and viewed as objects. Fanon states, “A feeling of inferiority? No, a feeling of nonexistence. Sin is Negro as virtue is white.

By being a mixed-race man, he was on the exact position to choose a side, to be black or white, -although he felt that most of the times he passed for white because of his way of living- and he rather chose none of them but both by referring himself just as an American, and perhaps that’s how he felt everyone had to be called. Being part of The Harlem Renaissance showed how confortable he was by existing around both races and by wanting the black race to rise. He showed his readers how the African American culture was oppressed and how their talent led them to go up North

The main protagonist of this novel is metaphorically invisible, everywhere he goes because he is black and it depicts his struggle to assert and prove himself visible. However, in the end, the hero of this novel realizes that his invisibility can be sometimes advantages to him and so he stopped complaining or protesting. "I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen" (Ellison). The protagonist is calmer and wiser after realizing and accepting the fact that all through his struggles throughout the novel, he has been invisible and unappreciated.

The narrator discusses feeling conflicted as to how he ought to behave after hearing his grandfather’s final words, preoccupied with how the whites “desired [him] to act” (1556) and how he should act. In this way, the narrator must not only worry about how he behaves, but how white people perceive it. In this chapter, we also see double consciousness specifically as the attempted reconciliation of being both black and American. This is perhaps most evident in the passage about the exotic dancer with “an American flag tattooed upon her belly” (1557) that is put in front of Ellison’s narrator and nine other black men. A crowd of white men surrounds them, “some [threatening] [them] if [they] looked, and others if [they] did not” (1557).

In the Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the unnamed narrator moves to New York to escape from the hatred and discrimination of the 1930s southern men and women and to have more of a say in his community by making an impact in their society. Because the narrator was often timid on what comes out of his mouth, he would often either go against what is actually right in his eyes or not speak at all. One slip up on what a black man says and who the man says it to, the narrator could be in deep trouble with the white men. Additionally, the narrator also is being forced to agree with every word out of a white man’s mouth and do exactly what is being asked of him. Also, the narrator is often disappointed and discouraged when he is not able speak

The novel sets a tone of frank and thoughtful. Racism as an obstacle to individual identity is the theme. The narrator is the protagonist. The narrator was very naïve because once he moved to New York racism was different from being in the south. The narrator is a static character because he refuses to change himself.

"His past ghetto life set him up to dismiss peacefulness and coordination and to acknowledge a solid separatist theory as the reason for dark survival," He even accepted at one time that whites were operators of the villain. Thus, "Malcolm X prescribed a separatist and patriot procedure for dark survival," He trusted that exclusive through savagery would conditions change. He saw no confirmation that white society had any ethical still, small voice and advanced the part of the furious dark against supremacist America. King 's rationalities displayed a sharp differentiation to those of Malcolm X. He trusted that through diligent work, solid authority, and peaceful strategies, blacks could accomplish full fairness with whites.

While he believed that Native Americans had the mental capacity to become equal to whites, they just had to conform to white man ways and they could live peacefully and become one race through interracial marriages. Jefferson, as said prior, wanted an agrarian, homogenous society. African Americans threatened this because they could not conform to the white ways. He thought that slavery was taking away the rights that African Americans were given by God, but a huge issue he saw was the corruption that began plaguing white men. Men were comfortable beating and even killing a human just to prove a point, and this showed throughout all ages in society when young boys became predigest and violent toward

The Invisible Man’s interior consciousness is so much more than other characters care to see him as. This is largely what makes him invisible in the first place. He is an intelligent, persistent, person who believes that someday he will become significant in the eyes of society. However his biggest flaw in his plan in becoming seen in society is the fact that, for most of the book, he doesn 't know who he really is. He alludes to this by saying, “It was exhausting, for no matter what the scheme I conceived, there was one constant flaw – myself.

Types Of Invisibility Present In Our Society For some people, invisibility is a boon; for others, it is a loss of their identity in society. In the story, The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, two concepts of invisibility are discussed. One such concept is racism, where whites view the blacks as different creatures and are invisible to their eyes in the form of humans who are equal in abilities to them. Another form of invisibility is when the narrator decides to adopt invisibility to recede power from the white community. Invisibility is still relevant in modern society because of dominance/power, hatred/discrimination, and being afraid to express oneself.

For this reason, Blacks always struggled to exist in a dominated white culture. Based on these stories, each character search to find their true identity, while finally accepting the issue of being ignored. For this reason, the man accepted that he was invisible and decided to use it for freedom and agility as he shouted, “no