Race and Identity in Ellison\'s

Race and Identity in Ellison's The Invisible Man Ralph Ellison wrote only one novel in his career but in said novel created one of the most enduring figurative statements on race and identity yet crafted in the American literary tradition. With 1953's Invisible Man, Ellison approached the conditions facing the modern black man with a focus on the psychological impact of being a constant 'other' in society. Though the unnamed narrator in Ellison's story is intelligent, sensitive and morally grounded, he remains something of a blank slate to those around him, allowing the reader to more clearly understand the loss of self and identity foisted even upon those 'others' who have largely succeeded in bypassing the incarceration and oppression of America's culture. In the 'invisible' narrator, we find that another form of social racism has worked to quietly detain outsiders such as the light-skinned black narrator from recognition for achievement. Hardin (2004) makes the case that Ellison's book represents a coalescence of emergent themes in the writing of abolitions, desegregations and civil rights leaders. The principle of invisibility, we find, may be substituted for with the concept of 'passing.' 'Passing,' or gaining acceptance in white society is represented by two layers of assimilation in Ellison's Invisible Man, both of which Hardin asserts threaten the desired status quo of white society. Hardin delineates racial identity and sexual orientation as two characteristics which have required the protagonist to make himself invisible and, further, identifies the ways in which this invisibility is feared by the white establishment. This is the primary theme of the work, driving home the premise that our narrator has sought survival through subtlety. Even as he becomes 'something' in society, directing his philosophical attention toward leftist activism, the character still avoids becoming 'somebody.' An ideal distinction for one who is ultimately driven toward socialist ideology, the character channels the negative implications of his anonymity into the positive service of the collective. The way that Ellison phrases it, we understand at the outset that his invisibility is a product of society's disregard from him, even as he has come to show so much virtue. He tells that "I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids-and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. " (Ellison, 3) Ellison explains that there is a persistent social disinterest in his contributions, helping to effectively portray the void into which so many bright and talented young black people would enter their efforts. The chameleonic life of the narrator suggests that he remained invisible in this regard even as he acted on those virtues which might recommend him. An additional element of the invisibility which Eillison explores is in the inherent sexual implications of separating races. The concept of miscegenation is explored as an avenue which is suppressed in order to sustain passability in white culture. The Hardin article denotes that this invisibility, essentially, "is about passing as white, and the resultant challenge to stable notions of race; however, at the subtextual level, this notion also seems to be about passing as heterosexual." (Hardin, 103) In this work, we can find a connection between the narrator's dedication to a constantly shifting identity and his desire to obscure either a racial or a sexual identity of any type of impact on those around him. Ellison levies a pointed criticism at a racially exclusionary society while simultaneously recognizing the willful decisions on the part of the protagonist to adopt this disposition. The author illustrates that the invisibility which he describes is not necessarily always derived from within the subject. One sentiment on the novel points to an elected invisibility, employed to defend one's self against the world's prejudices. For Ellison, it is instead an invisibility which comes from outside of himself. Hardin recounts that "the reason he is invisible is that 'people refuse to see me. . . they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed, everything and anything except me.'" (Hardin, 107) Ultimately, this becomes an instrument which the narrator is able to use to his advantage. When he dons the character of Rinehart, we find that the character's absence of form to those around him has allowed him to fully reinvent himself to the end of meeting purposes and ambitions not accessible to the self which he knew. The ability to literally adopt a false or new identity at this juncture in the story would demonstrate the true impact of his invisibility on the psyche though. Here, we find that the man has been able to forge no relationships, affiliations or responsibilities which might obstruct the creation of a new person through his own identity. In many regards, while this demonstrates the man's flexibility, it also shows him to be a somewhat lost figure, capable of manifesting in any form and to the notice of nobody. This freedom-an important distinction in the life of an American black man-is nonetheless underscored by a core loneliness to be observed in such a figure. Though Ellison's work points to the same social sickness at work in the other literary examples from African American, his story suggests less the narrator's complicity in this condition so much as his incapacity to resist it. At center, however, is the author's vain efforts at defining himself according to the often impossible fit of society's expectations with his own identity.