Resumo de The Invisible Man

The latter half of the twentieth century America saw the rise of many innovative and distinguished writers belonging to the minority or ethnic literary group.The dominant themes in the novels of Black American writers were racialism and racism.One notable African-American novelist was Ralph Ellison.He explored the black American experience and the inevitable questions of identity, love and hatred, race and class, society and politics.His debut novel Invisible Man (1952) made him an overnight success. The major themes of the novel were the quest for identity or the American identity, the oppression of blacks, pride and freedom, love and the liberating and regenerative power of art. The novel is bildungsroman which shows the hero?s development as an individual. The title refers to the theme of sight or true vision. The hero till the point of realisation or his epiphany is a blind-folded person, exploited and manipulated because of his innocence and lack of worldly experience.The novel is a neo-picaresque narrative featuring a modern picaro. The novel consists of three parts- the Prologue, the body and the Epilogue- each part covering a different stage in the development of the protagonist?s consciousness. The Prologue bemoans the invisibility of the hero. He begins the narrative with the claim that he is an ?invisible man.? His invisibility is not a physical condition but the result of the refusal of others to see him as a unique personality and moral equal. The body of the novel covers the incidents that lead to the protagonist?s isolated existence, away from society. The Epilogue however confesses the man?s share in the diminution of his authentic and visible identity and states his realisation that he must honor his individual complexity and remain true to his own identity without sacrificing his responsibility to the community. Ellison adapted the existentialists? universal themes to the American context, where blacks were treated inhumanly. The bases of identity such as region, clothes, food, work, social behaviour and idealogy are meaningless in a larger context. His consciousness of the absurdity of his state and the human invention of caste makes him angry and rebellious. Identity is denied to him and all the other blacks in an unequal white world. He finds no harmony even among the oppressed blacks. The novel is also an expression of the politics of race. The hero is left nameless intentionally as if to suggest the universality of experience. In the later sections of the novel, the hero joins the Brotherhood, a fictional representation of the communist party. But he soon discovers that the white leader of the Brotherhood has robbed him of his identity and made him an instrument of his misdeeds, harmful to the blacks.Ellison provides an answer, when he stresses the importance of social responsibilities. The quest for identity theme of Ellison at times transcends the racial issue and becomes the individual?s search for identity in a world with unequal power relations. The place of Ellison among the modern American novelists is as a skilful craftsman, employing the various literary techniques with dexterity. The novel is narrated in the stream of consciousness technique which reproduces the continuous flow of a character?s mental process mingling memories, sense perceptions and random associations, consciousness and subconsciousness.There are thus two movements in time ? one signifying the time of narration and the second the chronological sequence of incidents. The novel is thus a long monologue uttered by the hero. The stream of consciousness technique, the hallmark of his masters Joyce and Eliot, is a powerful technique employed by Ellison in the novel to portray the young black man?s disillusionment in a divided world.

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