Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man

3. factory episode: The factory represents white American society

4. boiler explosion and factory hospital: dream- or hallucinatory-like experience hospital machine - “melting pot”, designed to neutralize the sense of racial identity of American blacks

5. Mary Rambo: good spirit

she is “a stable, familiar force like s.th. out of [his] past” (210)

6. eviction of an old couple’s apartment: speech about dispossession

7. the Brotherhood: Brother Jack

a communist party with the ideal of equality demands total obedience provides a new identity has no respect for ethnicity

8. Tod Clifton: Harlem director for youth representative for the future later good spirit sells Sambo dolls (p.347) shot by a policeman

9. death struggle and symbolic death IM is hunted by the Brotherhood and by Ras and his men falls into his hole

he discovers that he needs light à he starts burning his documents (p.457)

III. The heightening of the hero

free of his former identity, free of the illusion of being visible, IM reaches the state of invisibility

The dualism in the Quest-motif

black vs. white, good vs. wrong Invisible Man: Clifton vs. Brother Jack, Ras vs. IM

Bibliography

Schulz, Dieter. Suche und Abenteuer. Die “Quest“ in der englischen und amerikanischen Erzählkunst der Romantik. Heidelberg, 1981, 6-23.

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

The most important structure that we find in Invisible Man is that of the Quest. The Quest is one of the oldest and most constant structures which can be found in early as well as in modern literature. Some examples are: The Gilgamesch epos, Virgil’s Aeneis, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. 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. For Invisible Man, it is the search for identity or for his self. There are 3 major parts to a Quest: the departure, the voyage with adventures, and the return or the heightening of the hero.

First, there is the departure of the hero. The hero parts from his social group, the reason for this is most of the times a disharmony within the society he lives in. For Invisible Man, this could be his departure from the hole he lives in, although it is not really a departure, he just tells the reader his story, starting from the beginning of his becoming slowly aware of his invisibility. But it could also be his expulsion from college after which he tries to find himself.

In the second part of the Quest, the hero undertakes a voyage and has to get through several adventures, fighting monsters, giants, being kind of seduced by beautiful women, the hero is led on the wrong track, and so on. But he also has helpful figures, good spirits to aid him and show him the right track. The height of adventures is reached in the deathstruggle 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. That’s also called initiation. For Invisible Man, this is the main part of the book starting with his journey to New York.

#On the bus trip to New York he meets the vet again whom he already knows from the Golden Day. The vet (here being one of those good spirits) gives him some fatherly advice: 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);