Growth And Quest In Narrative

Ralph Ellison is an outstanding African America writer in the history of theAmerican literature and the world literature. Invisible Man published in1952is hismasterpiece which is renowned as an African American classic, makes Ralph Ellison’sname known far and wide overnight, and wins Ralph Ellison numerous prizes.In Invisible Man, Ellison narrates the unique growth experience of the invisibleman, a black young man growing up in the white-dominated America where racialprejudice is widespread, with his elaborate employment of narrative techniques.Influenced by the racist social circumstances, the growth of the black young man ismuch more complicated. For this black protagonist, the greatest puzzlement on hisgrowth path is how to define himself, and what he quests for all the way is his identity.After experiencing the puzzlement and struggle, he eventually grows up with theachievement of finding his own identity.Owning to its great literary value, Invisible man has attracted the attention ofnumerous scholars and critics abroad and at home since its publication and has beenanalyzed from different perspectives, such as archetypal criticism, dialogism,existentialism, symbolism, and post-colonialism, etc. However, up to now, there havebeen few researches on Invisible Man from the perspective of Bildungsroman, andeven though few scholars and critics have analyzed Invisible Man from theperspective of Bildungsroman, most of their researches only concern the epiphany, thegrowth theme, the growth guide, etc. Based on the previous researches and findings,this thesis attempts to analyze the growth theme concerning the invisible man’s questfor identity on his growth path from the perspective of Bildungsroman and how thenarrative techniques are employed to present, stress and reinforce this unique growththeme, hoping to make an analysis of Invisible Man from a new perspective and toexplore the new vision of the study of Invisible Man.This thesis consists of three parts:The first part is the introduction to Ralph Ellison and his masterpiece InvisibleMan, the literature review of Invisible Man and the significance of this thesis.The second part is the main body of the thesis, consisting of five chapters.Chapter one focuses on the introduction to the theory of Bildungsroman including itsdefinition, its different designations, its origin, its development and its characteristics, and on the exploration that Invisible Man can be studied as a typical AmericanBildungsroman according to the general characteristics of American Bildungsroman.Chapter Two presents the exploration of the theme of Invisible Man as a typicalAmerican Bildungsroman, which is embodied by the black young protagonist’sgrowth of questing for identity. Chapter Three, Chapter Four and Chapter Fiveconcern the analysis of how the narrative techniques are employed to present, stressand reinforce the theme in terms of narrative time, narrative focalization and speechrepresentation respectively.The third part is the conclusion part of this thesis which emphasizes thatInvisible Man is a literary classic with perfect combination of growth theme andnarrative techniques and proposes the prospect of the follow-up researches on InvisibleMan.