summary:
A young black man from the South who is haunted by his grandfather's deathbed warning against conforming to the wishes of white people because the young man sees that as the way to be successful.
The narrator's first real glimpse at the cruel destiny of white people comes when he is invited to the local men's club to read the speech he prepared for his high school graduation. He gives the speech and is rewarded with a briefcase. After he endures the humiliation of performing for the white men. He and several black boys are forced to box each other and then scramble around a rug pulsing with electric current to grab coins while the white men laugh at their pain.
The young man sets out for the city unaware that the letters of recommendation are really a trick just to get him quietly away from the school. Once he finds out about the letters, he is so broke. After he has a incident, he moves into a room in a kindly woman's apartment and stays there without a job. He lives in hole until he runs into Mr. Norton one day in the subway and realizes that he will no longer conform to white expectations of him. Instead, he will reclaim his humanity by being who he is and no longer struggling to change that.
Analysis:
In
the invisible man, Ellison portrays a lonely character with struggling to search
for his identity and an understanding of his times. The well development of the
character lays out the foundation on the philosophy of finding and
understanding himself. Through a labyrinth of corruption and deceit the
narrator undergoes events.
The narrator at first never realizes his
innocence. At first the timid invisible man is invited to attend his
scholarship award ceremony. However with other Negroes he is rushed to the
front of the ballroom. After staging the "battle royal" and attacking
one another in response to the drunken shouts of the rich white folk, the boy
is brought to give his prepared oration of gratitude to the white benefactors.
An accidental remark to equality nearly ruins him, but the narrator manages to
survive and is given a briefcase containing a scholarship to a Negro college.
This acts is a high peak for narrator searcher for himself.
Ironically, the narrator had seen Dr. Bledsoe
as an idol aiming to gradually impersonate him. He was expelled for permitting.
After that incident the Invisible Man goes through the sense that he is losing his
identity. This initiates an air of confusion as the narrator is now brought in
a quarrel against himself.
If the narrator succeeds in finding his own
identity then he will
definitely be truthful to himself and the others. By finding his identity the
narrator has encounters with many people, since loneliness will be avoided.
Through many encounters the narrator begins to set out to find who he truly is.
By questioning his everyday living the narrator manages to progress in the
quest to achieve his goal.
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