Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

To what extent does the anonymity of the narrator provide an understanding of racism in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man ?

Since Invisible Man was published in 1952, no disquisition has focused on an explanation for Ralph Ellison choosing to make the narrator anonymous in the novel. Invisible Man is set in the late 1940’s America, right before the African American Civil Rights Movement, when racism against African-Americans was prevalent. Themes of identity and racism are closely linked throughout the novel. During the narrator’s experience, the racism he encounters results in him losing his own identity. The people he interacts with define him in their own terms and want him to fulfil only the roles assigned to him. He is unable to assert his individual identity, because his concept of himself and of the world is limited by the identity imposed upon him by those in power in his community (Powers, 1975). While the book received immense recognition and acclaim after publication, many black critics at the time were unimpressed with the novels fight against racism. Ralph Ellison claims that Invisible Man was not meant primarily to be “protest” but “art” (Ellison, 1964). Whatever its primary purpose, Ellison uses both subtle and overt ways of protesting against racism in the novel, such as making the narrator anonymous. To fill the gap in the analysis and understanding of racism in Invisible Man , the subject of this essay is Ralph Ellison’s decision to make the narrator anonymous. The essay will first examine the subtle and overt ways of how racism is an obstacle to the narrator’s identity. Then, the discussion of how anonymity is applied to all blacks in the setting of the novel is explored by contrasting the behaviours and actions of whites and blacks. Finally, the essay will discuss the manipulation of the narrator’s identity in the novel. This topic has been selected to examine the reasoning behind Ellison’s’ choice to make the narrator anonymous, and also facilitate a broader understanding of the portrayal of racism and black identity in 1940’s America. It also has the significance of explaining how racism has developed through history and how it has affected the concept of racism in the modern day. By reading the novel, readers can emphasize with the unfair disparagement of African-Americans in their recent history, which can help to educate and further understand how racism in the modern world can be rooted back only sixty years. The instability of identity due to racism produces a text framed by the story’s protagonist and thus the story’s exploration of black identity is based on the premise that the narrator wants to tell us a narrative that establishes his identity as an invisible man. The opening of the novel displays this in the first line and could not be clearer. “I am an invisible man” (pg.3).

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