Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to assess how Ralph Ellison’s choice of making the narrator anonymous in Invisible Man provides an understanding of the complexities of racism foregrounded in the novel. This is achieved by examining the question ‘To what extent does the anonymity of the narrator provide an understanding of racism in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man ? The scope of the essay encompasses the many events the narrator experiences and develops analysis of the two primary themes of the novel, racism and identity. Ralph Ellison cleverly uses metaphor in the novel to display racist philosophies and African-Americans struggle to establish their own identity, as well as exhibiting how the world around the narrator defines his identity in its own terms. Thus, it is evident that the themes of identity and racism are closely linked throughout the novel, and during the narrator’s experience, the racism he encounters results never being able to establish his own identity. Ellison’s choice of an anonymous narrator represents how racism in the novel came in the form of stripping African Americans such as the narrator of their individual identity, and instead assigning him one based on race. The perpetrators of this racism whom he interacts with defines him in their own terms and wants him to fulfil only the roles assigned to him. In 1958, 44 percent of whites said they would move if a black family became their next-door neighbor; since 1998 the figure remains under 1 percent (Thernstrom, 1998). While this statistic explicitly recounts the more apparent and overt racism near the setting of the novel, it does not fully account for modern racism in America. However modern racism can be rooted back to the setting of the novel and will be explored to explain how it has changed to the modern day.

Word Count = 299

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