On Trauma Narratives In Ralph Ellison’s Novels

Ralph Ellison is an influential novelist,literary critic and scholar in the field of African-American literature.His two novels,Invisible Man and Juneteenth,which he devoted his life,have been highly praised by American literary and academic circles.Ellison’s literary creation does not continue the narrative tradition of black "protest novels",but tells the fate of the race with a soothing and peaceful brush stroke.Through the deconstruction of the false social spatial order,the writer reveals the potential human crisis in the survival dilemma of African descent,which provides the possibility of exploring the root causes of the trauma syndrome of the black community,exploring the mystery of racial identity,and reconstructing racial cultural self-confidence.The question raised in this paper is how Ralph Ellison realized his black ideal as a black writer in transition.The main body of this paper consists of five parts.In the first part,it mainly introduces Ellison’s academic achievements,sorts out the research results of Invisible Man and Juneteenth by scholars at home and abroad,and defines the concept of key words to clarify the author’s research ideas and innovations.The first chapter of the text explores the root causes of Ellison’s traumatic narrative,combines the historical and cultural background of the United States and the internal relevance of the author’s works,and deeply explores the sense of oppression rooted in the bloodline.The second chapter discusses the types of trauma narratives in Ellison’s novels from the three dimensions of family trauma narrative,social trauma narrative and racial trauma narrative,and sets the tone of trauma narrative in the overall direction.The third chapter relies on the detailed reading method of the text,summarizes the basic characteristics of Ellison’s trauma narrative,makes a meticulous view of the time,place,character and plot,grasps the substantive problems of the narrative through representation,and interprets Ellison’s real intention.The fourth chapter explains the value of Ellison’s traumatic narrative.It perceives how the writer Ellison got rid of the narrative shackles of traditional black "protest novels" and helped the black group with lost self-identity build a difficult process of racial and cultural self-confidence through narrative discourse to shape the image.The image of black people shaped by Ellison in the text struggled in the difficult situation of survival and tried to obtain redemption,but crossing the barriers of class,race,culture and region undoubtedly faced huge challenges.The discourse construction of the traumatic narrative breaks down the cognitive misunderstanding of blacks and whites living in harmony and refutes the fragile human commonality,which is essentially racial stereotypes and absurd fantasies between the same species.Through thinking about the racial identity of blacks,Ellison gradually uncovered the complexity of human nature deliberately behind social stereotypes.