Invisibility Applied to The White, The Black, and The Woman in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

The manifestation of invisibility acts as a crucial element in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Throughout the novel, Ellison provides numerous uses of invisibility. According to Yonka Krasteva’s “Chaos and Pattern in Ellison’s Invisible Man” the structure of Invisible Man and its perception of relationships “collapses the center/margin polarity, turning the boundary, the in-between space, into a turbulent eddy, threatening to disrupt the traditional hierarchical arrangement” (56). Ellison’s novel highlights the major events in America’s changing time: a time where the black man begins his ascend out of slavery to obtain some of the same rights and privileges as the white man. The question may still remain on why Ellison chooses invisibility as his main trope throughout the entire novel? Invisibility plays a major role throughout the novel and can be analyzed and described in different ways. For the purpose of this paper, the focus will be on Ellison’s use of invisibility not only as a political and social criticism of African American treatment during this time period but also that Ellison goes beyond a political or social statement to emphasis the blindness in which many Americans were raised; his trope of invisibility encompasses the white man’s hierarchy and his refusal to have his power diminished, the black man’s and white woman’s blurred line in the hierarchy, and the black woman’s continued ignorance and invisibility in the novel.

To read more request: Spring 2018 Modern American Literature Paper