Similarities Between Giovanni's Room And Invisible Man

James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man did more than refute the classical canon through their content. The two literary works went further by pushing the norms of the black male prototype and his societal position in America. Giovanni’s Room and Invisible Man tell two very dissimilar stories, yet both protagonists endure the same mental adversities. Baldwin’s narrative tells the heart -wrenching story of sexual exploration through two star-crossed lovers, David and Giovanni. David, a supposed white hetero- male travels to France where he encounters Giovanni. The two begin a passionate journey through love, lust, sex, and death. Giovanni’s Room acts simultaneously as a site of empowerment and a location of weakness.

Set in the South and then transitioning to New York, the unidentified narrator, like David, undergoes a voyage through self discovery. He is expelled from a prestigious black university, loosely based on Tuskegee University, then ordered to go to New York where he is to find work for a year to pay for his last year’s tuition; however, Ralph Ellison’s protagonist begins to accept that he can no longer return to school and starts to look for work all while capturing the attention of a communist like organization called, The Brotherhood. The narrator’s involvement with The Brotherhood in addition to other encounters with white men in the novel affects the protagonist’s racial identity causing him to slowly begin to see his true position as a black male in American society. By the end of the novel, the narrator lives underneath the city where, unlike David, his space becomes a place of

There are objects and language utilized in each literary work that perpetuates identity hardships for both characters. These objects and language located in each text that subtly play an integral role in David’s and Ralph Ellison’s protagonist’s sexual and self discovery are referred to as signs. Within a course outline electronically provided by Brown University on Linguist Ferdinand De Saussure, the term sign, as it pertains to language, is deconstructed in a thorough manner which makes its definition universally comprehended. Brown University outlines a sign as, “A focus on how meaning is constructed, not what the meaning is (as in content analysis). It thus treats its objects as texts (as meaningful on the basis of shared codes and conventions), not as autonomous objects with pre-existent and universally apparent meaning.” In essence a sign is the arbitrary construction of words. It is understood that an object is an object (i.e. a table is a table) because we have been told such; however, the terminologies and meanings for terms are not interchangeable globally due to the autonomy or freeness of their created meanings (ex. a chair in English is called and possibly have a different use in Spanish). Ultimately, language is a system of arbitrary signifying signs which produces the various words we utilize on a