The Pursuit Of Identity: A Postcolonial Study Of Invisible Man

Invisible Man is the only saga novel of Ralph Ellison who has spent as long as seven years dedicating to finish. It has been hailed as one of the epoch-making novels and epic of the modern American black's lives. Some of the major newspapers such as Times, New York Times, Comments on Saturday etc, highly praise this novel for having important literary value and regard it as the landmark of the black American literary history.Firstly, Invisible Man is a black novel. Ellison obtains the first-hand materials from the lives of the black as a black writer and describes the suffering experiences of a poor black youth from south in order to explore how the black seek for their true freedom and how to implement their ego identity in a white-dominated society. Thus Invisible Man is a typical novel with identity as the theme of it. In this novel, Ellison points out that the main suffering of the African Americans is not the naked colonial exploitation from the whites any more, but a new form of exploitation, namely"invisible"post-colonial exploitation. Post-colonialism is a new aggressive policy that the developed countries suppress and penetrate the thought, culture and ideology to the inferior races and nations.This thesis takes some views of post-colonialism, such as Fanon's views of race and identity, Said's notion of"the Other"and Homi Bhabha's"Third Space", as theoretical supports to interpret the main theme of this novel. Invisible Man takes the"invisible"form as an expression, pays more attention to the spiritual depression that the protagonist has always sensed and perceived and describes the process of psychological dissimilation. This novel takes the protagonist's journey from innocence to mature realization and finally awakening of sufferings as the storyline and puts emphasis on efforts of the protagonist's pursuit for his ego identity, as well as the enlightenment of modern human being's seeking for self identity and sense of alienation concerning racial, cultural and identical Other. Finally, the protagonist is aware that his true identity of"Third Space"is neither the white-dominated American nor the traditional black African, but"an invisible man". All these make this novel deeper in theme and more profound in influence than general black novels.