Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man As Bildungsroman

Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man, demonstrates the characteristics a "coming of age" story through the narrator's attempt to discover who he is in a world of people trying to tell him who he should be. Through several significant events and through deep introspection, the narrator does succeed in finding his identity becoming our existentialist hero. Our narrator realizes who he is from his early experience with his grandfather, his lone experience in the hospital and in the final scene. These scenes represent the narrator's character development toward self-identity.

At the beginning of the novel, we are introduced to the narrator's inner conflict with society that leads to his search for significance. His grandfather tells him some disturbing things on his deathbed, causing our narrator to believe that this "spoiled his triumphs in life" (Ellison 34). Among these things was the notion that he should not live a meek life. Our narrator did not take his grandfather's advice but instead decides to live as most African-Americans do. They were passive and generally subscribed to the notions that other people had about them instead of expressing their own thoughts and opinions. This experience is significant because it demonstrates the narrator's frame of mind and why he believes the way he does. He is being shaped by a society that has no qualms in telling him who he is even though he is not what they say.

In Invisible Man, certain experiences help the narrator discover who he is, however uncomfortable they may be. John Stark maintains that the narrator "must find an identity" (Stark 60) and he has no real identity "until... he realizes he is an invisible man" (Stark). One experience that forces the narrator to face certain realities about himself occurs with the encounters with the doctors in the hospital. The experience is terrifying but it forces the narrator to undergo a type of rebirth as he struggles to discover who is. As the doctor's ask him his name, all the narrator can do is feel "swift shame" (Ellison 209). When he asked who he is, the narrator states that trying to answer the question was "like trying to identify one particular cell that coursed through the torpid veins of my body" (210). He states that he "lay fretting over my identity" (212). These scenes drive the narrator to think about who he is one a very basic level. It is cathartic because he actually has an opportunity to remake himself. His is more alone than he has ever been and he is frightened because he cannot say or do anything. He is at the mercy of doctors that poke fun at him even though they can clearly see his anguish. This section of the novel is significant because it illustrates the terror involved with self-discovery.

At the end of the novel in the final scene, the narrator realizes that he has not been true to himself because his problem was that he "always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself" (496). He realizes that while he may feel invisible, he is not; he is a real man with real thoughts and opinions and he is finally beginning to understand what they are. For example, he finally comes to terms with being African-American and asks why he should "strive toward colorlessness" (499) in a world of individuals that want to be the same, which means they do not want to be themselves. He observes, "life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat" (499). He realizes that the best way to live to by living as one was born. Robert Lee observes, "what we are left with at the end of the novel is a man living in clear understanding of what he is, but with no means of giving expression to that understanding" (Lee 32). He does not find the gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow but he does realize the significance of knowing oneself and that drives him out of hibernation back into the world, whether or not he is invisible. Upon entering the world again, he is aware that this is the best that one can do.