An Analysis Of Intertextuality In Invisible Man

The publication of Invisible Man in1952earned Ralph Ellison great reputation as a major African American writer with profound knowledge of the black people, folk culture and a sound background in American classical literature. Ellison has created an epic-like novel about a black man searching for self-identity in modern America. What contributed to the great success of this novel has always been the focus in the academic appreciation.This thesis attempts to interpret the novel from a new angle-the theory of intertextuality.The theory of intertextuality is a significant theory which belongs to the literary creation and literary reviews in poststructuralism and postmodernism. Intertextuality holds that no text is isolated from the others. This text is closely related to past texts, present texts, and future texts in this or that way. The existence of all the texts looks like a web. In the web, there is no source, no order, and no scale. Therefore, interpreting the text is not limited to the single text any more like before; other texts can be read for reference to interpret this text. There is no ultimate meaning of the text. The author has no authority any more or he is no longer the center or leader any more. Therefore, how to interpret a text is different from person to person. In other words, interpreting the text is simultaneously the recreation of the text.This thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is an introduction of Ralph Ellison’s life experiences and his work Invisible Man. The second chapter is a brief introduction of the recent researches on Invisible Man at home and abroad, the aims of the thesis, and the theory of intertextuality. The third chapter is the key part of the thesis. It starts to interpret Invisible Man in details by virtue of intertextual reading. This chapter consists of five parts:the first part is the intertextual reading between the story of king Arthur and knights of the round table looking for the Grail and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man; the second part is on Invisible Man’s the absorption and quotation of the story of Garden of Eden in Holy Bible; the third part is concerned about the writing styles of the novella, the postmodern novel to witness Invisible Man is a parody of the writing styles, like the open ending and black humor; the fourth part is concerned about the language style of the novella. It claims that Invisible Man makes full use of the musical style of jazz and blues to better express its themes and achieve great aesthetical effects; the last one is about an explicit intertext, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground.The last part of this thesis is the conclusion, which maintains that using the theory of intertextuality to analyze Invisible Man is reasonable and meaningful in literature appreciation.