How Does Ralph Ellison Create Identity In Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, follows a nameless narrator who has spent most of his life living as a model African American citizen. After showing a wealthy white trustee, Mr. Norton, the underbelly of African American culture by visiting Trueblood’s Cabin and the Golden Day bar, the narrator is kicked out of the prestigious college in Southern America that he was attending. In an attempt to find a job so that he may eventually re-enroll, the narrator moves to New York City, only to find that the college president had no intentions of allowing the narrator to return. In the span of his time in New York, the narrator ends up in a boiler room explosion, becomes a prominent figure of a communist group, and participates in a riot in Harlem. Throughout his entire time in the South and for a majority of his time in the North, the

There is a conflict between how he perceives himself and the opinions of who he is that others project onto him.

In the beginning of Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison portrays a young African American man’s struggle to find his identity in Southern, white America. The narrator’s struggle leads him from a blind ignorance of the social oppression to an enlightened knowledge of his true place in society, as a man who is “invisible” to the world around him. Through a motif of blindness, Ellison is able to effectively show the narrator’s struggle between how he perceives himself and the projection of others. While there are many instances throughout the novel where blindness is used in the literal sense, the “adjective isn’t immediately evident or relevant in itself” when Ellison is using it to emphasize the narrator’s naive ambitions to climb the social ladder in a society that is structured to ignore minorities, like people of color and women (Foster 212). In the first part of the novel, one symbol that embodied the contrast between blind ignorance