Text in Context: American Literature of the 20th Century
WS 2000/01

Ralph Ellison Invisible Man

by

Anke Balduf

11.01.01

The Quest 1

I. The departure of the hero 1

II. The voyage with adventures 1

III. The heightening of the hero 2

Bibliography 2

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man 3

The Quest

• can be defined as a voyage with a goal, a "Suchwanderung".
• the goal is usually a treasured item or one′s own soul.
• 3 major parts: the departure, the voyage with adventures, and the return or the heightening of the hero.
• Invisible Man: the search for identity or for his self.

I. The departure of the hero

The hero parts from his social group
reason: a disharmony within the society he lives in.
Invisible Man: his departure from the hole he lives in
or
his expulsion from college after which he tries to find himself.

II. The voyage with adventures

The hero undertakes a voyage and has to get through several adventures: fighting monsters and/ or giants, being seduced by beautiful women, being led on the wrong track.
Helpful figures: good spirits who aid him and show him the right track.
The height of adventures: reached in the death struggle or supreme ordeal, where the hero dies a symbolic death. This means that his former self dies, and this death is followed by a spiritual rebirth. -->  initiation.

1. bus trip to New York
fatherly advice by the vet: learn to look beneath the surface (127); play the game, but play it your own way. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate (128); be your own father, young man. And remember, the world is possibility if only you′ll discover it (130).

2. disillusionments: 
The letters of recommendation from Bledsoe

3. factory episode: 
The factory represents white American society
the whiteness of American purity is intensified by the mixture of a strictly controlled amount of black
American reality looks different to blacks than it does to whites and that for white Americans blacks are invisible.

[...]