Literature, Identity, and Self-Discovery: A Personal Reflection

The Power of Literature to Reveal Identity

Tobias Wolff disagrees with those who say that studying the humanities is losing favor. He argues that, given the concerns of people today, it is even more important to study literature: "There is a need in us for exactly what literature can give, which is a sense of who we are, beyond what data can tell us, beyond what simple information can tell us; a sense of the workings of what we used to call the soul. People go where they can find that. They need to find that. In this secular and material culture, it's a kind of oasis."

This paper will review several pieces of literature to help gain a sense of who I was, what I became, and what I have the opportunity to be. It will be a baring of my soul so that I can find my oasis.

Invisibility and the Search for Self in Ellison

How many people walk down the street each day and feel they are invisible? Other individuals bump into them, do not say "sorry," and go on as though nothing happened. They say hello to the store clerk, but he does not respond. They go to work and everyone rushes around them. Often, people of color face an even greater risk of being ignored — either because they are feared, disliked, or not considered worth the time and bother to be acknowledged. Ironically, it is not difficult to lose one's identity in a world of millions of people.

In Invisible Man, the narrator says that he is invisible. It is not that his body cannot be seen — rather, people simply do not see him. Because of his "invisibility," he hides from the world, living underground and stealing electricity from the Monopolated Light & Power Company. He simultaneously burns 1,369 light bulbs and listens to Louis Armstrong's "(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue" on the record player to prove to himself that he exists, that he is flesh and blood. Now he is going to write the story of his life and his invisibility. As he writes:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, 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. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination — indeed, everything and anything except me.

Ellison's unnamed narrator is compelled, similarly to anyone who seeks a meaningful and committed life, to deal with numerous challenges and hazards, and to find his way to the truth of the present by learning from his past and then applying what he has learned to the present and future. By coming to terms with his blackness, he defines the values by which he can live and a way of connecting his own personal efforts to those that face all humans searching for the American dream.

Essentially, Invisible Man's major theme is a person's search for identity. The narrator moves from the naivety of youth to a mature state of adult understanding, represented by the brightness of the lightbulbs in his underground hiding place. Eventually, he realizes that his identity as a Black person is wholly determined by the perceptions of other people, and thus he feels invisible. Whether he is a student, an employee, or a political activist, he is seen only as a member of his race. Rather than being interested in him as an individual, others use him for whatever purpose they have for his race. Ellison notes that minorities in particular face this problem, losing individual identity through classification as members of a group rather than being seen as individuals.

Constantly misinformed or deceived, the narrator learns through a series of revelations that people are seldom what they seem. For example, in the earlier parts of the book, Dr. Bledsoe, president of the college, is apparently respected by both whites and blacks. The narrator even dreams of someday taking Bledsoe's position. However, Bledsoe reveals his true character when the narrator accidentally discovers aspects of Black life that Bledsoe has long concealed. Bledsoe is furious, for he has spent his entire life exploiting liberal white preconceptions about Black culture in order to gain power over the very people he claims to represent.

Growing Up Black and Female in New York

Invisibility takes many different forms. My own invisibility was that of a Black female growing up in New York. As with many Black people of my generation — I am now 50 — childhood consisted of a series of major challenges. I came from a very poor family that could barely afford rent and food. My father lived with us until I was 13 and then completely abandoned his past. He left one day and was gone for good.

By the time my father had left, I had already become "invisible." As a little girl, it did not take me long to realize that I was somehow different from the white children around me. At first I thought it was only "things" that separated us. Many of them had more toys, a bigger house, a fancy car — all the things we could not afford. The advertisements I saw in papers and the commercials I watched on TV showed happy white children playing and having fun. They lived in a completely different world than I did.

As I grew older, I also noticed other differences in those commercials. Everyone was always smiling. Many times there was a mother, father, and child spending time together, or at least a mother hugging and smiling with her son or daughter. There was not the slightest hint that life could ever be bad. Even when a child fell down and needed a bandage, her mother would quickly come to the rescue, kiss the bump, and apply some magical ointment.

By no means am I saying that my mother did not love me — she always did whatever she could for me. However, when my father was with us, much of her time was spent caring for him. Arguments with loud yelling became the typical form of communication. After my father left, my mother had to work two jobs to continue paying the expenses. She was rarely home, and I became accustomed to coming home to an empty house. When she was home, she was exhausted and simply needed to rest. I knew she loved me, but she was not the smiling mother I saw on TV who could make all my pain disappear. I was too young and naive to know that the perfect world in those commercials did not exist for anyone — white or Black.

My next understanding came around the issue of color. Of course, I always knew that the people in the advertisements looked different from me. Yet I had equated those differences to money or social standing, not color. When I started school, I quickly learned that I was "different" because I was Black. By the time I graduated from elementary school, my self-esteem was low. When my father left — even though it was ultimately for the best — my confidence fell even lower. Not only was I invisible to the outside "white" world, but to my own father as well. This is very difficult for a young girl of 13 to understand. As an adolescent, I was going through so many other things at the same time. Today I look back on this period and it might sound as though I always whined or complained, but that could not be further from the truth. I was very quiet and rarely spoke at home or school. My teachers never had to worry about me; my mother knew she could leave me alone and I would be all right.

From a positive standpoint, I did experience firsthand the passage of the Civil Rights laws in 1965 and 1970. As a young girl, I saw the marches on television and heard the speeches. I knew life was changing for the better, but not quickly enough for an impatient teenager.

Camus, Absurdity, and the Burden of Existence

In 1942, Albert Camus first defined the human situation as fundamentally meaningless and absurd. In his essay "The Myth of Sisyphus," the mythical King of Corinth, Sisyphus, is condemned for all eternity to the useless and absurd task of rolling a stone up a mountain, only to watch it come tumbling back down. This was his lot in life. He would have no opportunity to do anything else for himself or anyone else.

According to Camus, such endless, meaningless repetition mirrors human existence. Life is pointless and absurd and cannot be justified in either religious or humanist terms. The only reason to continue living is to accept and transcend the absurdity with personal scorn and strength. Camus is overwhelmingly concerned with the impact of his ideas on everyday life — with coping with the severe and confusing realities of daily existence. Based on all of this, Camus asks: in the face of such defeat, can a person actually be happy? It is possible. It is the only reality a person has. In this world, an individual must confront the limitations of knowledge:

I don't know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms... I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.

Man is given two choices: he can take his own life, thereby allowing both absurdity and meaningless death to triumph over him, or he can rebel, continually rejecting death even as he accepts that he will one day die. In everyday life, the mechanical and repetitive contains both tragedy and comedy. Seen one way, there is no room for higher meaning than daily survival. Seen another way, the comic spirit can escape the endless tragic repetitiveness. Camus writes:

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He, too, concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Unlike Camus's Sisyphus, I became too disconsolate with life and could not see any reason for pushing the rock up the hill over and over again. As I got older, I became increasingly tired and unable to push against life itself. I also lacked the creative outlet that Camus describes, and so had nothing positive to fill the void in my life. I was lonely and alone. Unfortunately, I did find something to erase the pain and fill the void, but it was not positive. I then spent 24 years of my life pushing that rock up the hill over and over again, going further and further downhill each time. This was the route I had chosen to escape from the daily absurdity — taken with the unexpressed hope of forever escaping from it entirely.