Ambiguity In Invisible Man By Ralph Ellison

Paul Tillich famously stated, “The awareness of ambiguity of one’s highest achievements (as well as one’s deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity.” In other words, the attainment of moral ambiguity as one navigates through life is a concrete sign of bildungsroman and awareness of one’s invisibility within society. An invisibility which hinders the development of individuality causes people to become complacent with social conformity. In the novel, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the narrator shares his journey of becoming morally ambiguous as he becomes consciously aware of his invisible status as a black man in American society during the 1930s. Ralph Ellison, in his memoir, conveys the narrator’s progressive attainment of ambiguous

Ellison first embeds irony within the narrator’s trust of his own race. When the narrator reads Dr. Bledsoe’s reference letter to Mr. Emerson, he is in great disbelief because the letter directs Mr. Emerson to give him false hope of returning to the college and attaining work from him. After digesting the purpose of the various letters he received from Dr. Bledsoe, the narrator bitterly decides “that [he] would go back and kill Bledsoe… [he’d] owe it to the race and to [himself]. [He’d] kill him” (Ellison 194). Before fighting with Dr. Bledsoe, the narrator greatly admired him because he is a successful educated black man with connections to very powerful and wealthy white men. Ralph Ellison constructed Dr. Bledsoe to contradict the existentialist theme of the novel with regards to conformity. Dr. Bledsoe conformed to white society by following precedent social cues for African Americans, such as doing what the white man asks and being polite to them. Ellison utilizes Dr.Bledsoe as a catalyst for destroying the narrator’s blind trust in authority figures to contrive the narrator’s maturation and ambiguous morals. Before Dr. Bledsoe’s betrayal, the narrator would only commit good deeds to appease the white men and Dr. Bledsoe in order to conform into white Southern society; however, after Bledsoe’s betrayal, it is evident that the narrator’s moral has somewhat shifted. He can no longer trust his own kind, even though they have similar experiences of being African Americans in a white-dominated society because they all have their own agendas to follow and are only using the narrator to achieve their goals. The developed distrust further manifest itself and propels the narrator along his journey to invisibility. When the narrator confronts Brother Jack and questions his