Invisibility In Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison is one of the most important novelists whose famous novel Invisible Man has a firm position in the American canon since the publication of this novel in 1952 and it is regarded as one of the most famous novels in American literature.This novel puts forward such common questions—"Who am I?" and "What is my real identity?" that haunt the modern man through the protagonist. This novel is different from other novels created by other black writers, for it doesn't emphasize the blacks' racial protest but the state of invisibility in the white dominant society. The hero of the novel is a nameless black young man and he is full of hope for his future. In order to be recognized by the white dominant society, he keeps being deferent to the whites. But in the continuous searching for his identity, he realizes that his is a tool used by the whites and he finds that the dominant force in the society according to their needs imposes his identity, so the protagonist of no background seems to count for little and he feels that he is just like an empty shell of no blood and flesh and what he does can't be recognized by others. At the end, the protagonist realizes his invisibility.Invisibility in Invisible Man refers to the state that the narrator can't be accepted by the society in the white dominant society. This thesis makes life and literary career of Ralph Ellison, the influences of some American writers, such as Hemingway and Emerson, etc. and the influences of some great black figures, such as Wright, etc. and black native culture as a base and this thesis intends to analyze invisibility systematically from the experiences of the nameless protagonist, the connotation of invisibility, the reasons of invisibility and three phases of invisibility.