A Study On The Archetypes And Their Artistic Representations In Invisible Man

As one of the most important African American novelist, Ralph Waldo Ellison (1914-1994) was best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won him the National book award for fiction in 1953 and established his literary reputation. At its first appearance in 1952, Invisible Man was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and was widely considered as one of the most important American novels since World War II.Since its publication, critics have applied various literary theories to interpret Invisible Man, producing hundreds, if not thousands of, books as well as essays about this novel. Due to Ellison's profound literary, folkloric and mythical allusions in Invisible Man, Archetypal approach has become one of the many tools employed by critics in reading this novel. Most of the works written in this respect, however, focus on its archetypal narrative pattern and trickster figures.Drawing from the previous research, this thesis aims at a more systematic investigation into the archetypes used in Invisible Man from three aspects:the archetypal narrative pattern, the archetypal imageries and the archetypal characters.It argues that by employing archetypes in an ingenious way, Ellison constructed in the novel a complex symbolic system, leading readers into the essence of reality veiled behind its appearance without sacrificing the vivid portrayal of characters. By the same way, Ellison not only ironies a society burdened with repressive racism, but also celebrates the humanity of blacks in his exploration of the motif of "invisibility," a fact that enables his novel to transcend the limits of pure protest literature and to reach the depth of the novelistic art.