Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2018

The subtle and overt ways of racism as an obstacle to the narrator’s own identity. Although the abolition of slavery in America had passed, the stereotypical and racist views towards African Americans remained in the white American mind. The novel takes place soon after the end of WWII in the latter half of the 1940’s, not long before the Civil Rights Movement began in America. During this time, the Jim Crow segregation laws had been introduced, while racist views towards African Americans covered all American life. The Jim Crow laws could impose legal punishments on people for consorting with members of another race. The most common types of laws forbade intermarriage and ordered business owners and public institutions to keep their black and white clientele separated (Nps.gov, 2018). Blacks and whites were not allowed to mix, which made the two races very separated in terms of social life. As the narrator tries to establish his own identity, he finds that the prescribed role that he must play limits his complexity as an individual and forces him to play an unauthentic role, which all accumulate to lead to the narrator being anonymous. In the prologue of the novel, we are introduced to an unnamed narrator. It is explained in the second sentence that he is not “one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms” (pg.2), but he is invisible because people, “refuse to see (him)”. Later in the prologue the narrator describes a past experience in which he accidentally bumps into a white man while walking down the street. After exchanging insults, the narrator attacks the man, and the man is left beaten. The next day the narrator sees the man’s picture in the news, beneath a caption that wrote he ‘had been mugged by an invisible man’ (pg. 5). This is a perfect display of racism, and how even when inaccurate, the news report fails to give him an identity due to his race, and instead calls him an invisible man. In the setting of the novel, it is clear that African Americans struggled to establish their own identity, as values of racism from white society identify blacks as all the same, not by individual traits. The term ‘invisible’ is chosen as the actual identity of the mugger is irrelevant, as it was an African American who committed the crime. Another form of racism which is evident in the narrator’s interactions with others is through the employment he acquires upon arriving in New York, at the Liberty Paints Plant, which achieves financial success by subverting blackness in the service of a brighter white. The company’s slogan reads “If it’s optic white, it’s the right white” (pg.210), which is an overt form of racism, as one can clearly see the prejudice against blacks in calling optic white the “right white”. Additionally, through irony and metaphor, Ellison uses language to underpin both subtle and overt racism to better portray how hypocritical and racist the company truly is. The name of the company itself, ‘Liberty Paints’ is an ironic statement in that the company uses the word ‘liberty’ in its title. The irony is in its display of racism and prejudice, such as when the manager rudely rebukes the

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