Jazz Notes Resounding In Words

African American writer Ralph Waldo Ellison and his novel Invisible Man always come to the front when one looks through the twentieth century American literature and the world literature. Rich in symbolism and metaphor, virtuosic in its use of multiple styles and tones, and steeped in the black experience in America and the human struggle for individuality, Invisible Man is hailed as one of the most important American novel appearing after World War II. Consequently, Ralph Ellison obtains plenty of honors and awards based on the celebrity of this novel;his ideas and writing techniques exert sweeping influences on the following generations of African American writers like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, etc. Numerous critical works on Ralph Ellison and his Invisible Man have noticed the weightiness of jazz, an indigenous American music, on Ellison's life, and furthermore touched upon the jazz notes between the lines of the novel. Yet few has made in-depth analysis on how jazz is woven into the words and fabric of Invisible Man which was accomplished after seven years'efforts to make each word and sentence count in significance and style. This thesis endeavors to discover the notes of jazz that were either underestimated or overlooked and aims to explore a new entrance to the understanding of Ralph Ellison and Invisible Man from the angle of jazz, which is a practical yet nearly untrodden way. Ralph Ellison once said: "Art thou troubled? Music will ennoble thee."(SA, P198) For Ellison, jazz is both a path leading to a noble life and a source of inspiration in writing. The personal experiences of a trumpet player and social background of Jazz Age gestated Ellison's dream of being a jazz musician and exerted great influences on his systematic cultural and literary ideas when he later pursued the profession of writing. Ellison believes that America is jazz-based so he comprehends its cultural elements in a jazz view and reads jazz into various outstanding writers and their works, for example, E. T. Eliot and The Waste Land. Meanwhile, Ellison introduces jazz into his own writing as well. In his magnum opus Invisible Man, Ellison transforms jazz notes into words. He endows characters and environments with flavor of jazz and makes creative use of jazz techniques, such as improvisation, riffing, call-and-response and polyrhythm, in designing the novel's language, structure and themes. The thesis is divided into six parts, each developing its own topic but all echoing on each other on the base of combination of jazz and words. Introduction is a brief review on the status and the former studies of Ralph Ellison and his Invisible Man. Chapterâ… runs down the track of jazz in Ellison's growth and his education to display the role it plays in Ellison's life and soul. As Ellison grew up in an era that jazz gradually gained power in American society and finally built the basic tone for the society, he cherishes the dream of being a jazz musician he had before stepping onto the road of a man of letters. Jazz, as well as literature, is his life-long passion. Chapterâ…¡unfolds Ellison's profound cultural and literary ideas expressed in vocabulary of jazz. Holding on to the belief that America is jazz-based, Ellison regards jazz as a metaphor for American society and a practical instrument for literary critics and writing. He has found an effective method to explain his systematic cultural and literary ideas in jazz performance. Chapter â…¢explores how Ellison transforms jazz into readable words by the close reading of Invisible Man. Ellison designs visible jazz notes into his novel and they can be seen in the lines of the novel via the production of acoustic effects imitating jazz performance and the descriptions of jazz-flavored...