Blindness in Native Son, by Richard Wright and Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison

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The anaphora of blindness reveals itself in the two African American novels, Native Son by Richard Wright, written before the civil rights era, and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, written in the mid 1950’s. They are spliced in an effort to center in on the American racial discrimination and segregation through both Wright’s and Ellison’s imagery to show how white supremacists forced African Americans to live a life without progression. Not only are whites responsible for the lack of progression within the black race, but blacks themselves are partially responsible for their own quality of life. Both races have chosen to turn a blind eye and neglect those who are oppressed. Ellison and Wright both depict blindness as a rebellious point of view that plays an important role in the everyday struggle for African Americans against white supremacists. Blindness is the state of refusing to see someone as an individual. The state of being blind is not only exclusive to whites; black and white individuals can both jointly share the state of blindness. Whites tend to see blacks as a whole, rather than each being an individual, making them blind. Blacks are seen as blind because they allow themselves to be mistreated by their oppressors.
Native Son focuses on African American racial discrimination and segregation that took place prior to the Civil Rights movement. As racial discrimination remains a reality in America today, the racial tensions and separatist laws that caused the violence and fear between blacks and whites may not be familiar to anyone who has not experienced any of the aforementioned. Set in Chicago in the 1930’s, Native Son tells the story of a young African American...

... middle of paper ...

...ut needing the white man’s consent and the narrator by coming out of hiding and facing the world and its challenges.

Works Cited
Bloch, Alice. “Sight Imagery in “Invisible Man.”” The English Journal, Vol. 55. No. 8
(Nov.1966): 1019-1021, 1024. National Councils of Teachers of English. Web. 15 Dec.
2013.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1903. Print.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, Inc., 1952. Print.
Howe, Irving. Black Boys and Native Sons. Dissent, Autumn 1963.Web. 9 Dec. 2013. http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/howe-blackboys.html Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940. Print.
Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices. New York: Basic Books, 1941. Print.

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