Now You See Me

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Recommended: Symbolism of identity

The largest identifying factor that a person has is her appearance. When she looks in the mirror in the morning, she sees herself. On the surface the traits that identify her are shallow things: she has pinky-pale skin, coppery hair and dark eyes. However, those simple traits have a greater meaning, a greater symbolic: her skin tone and hair display her Irish roots, and her dark eyes come from her Italian father. She can then further delve into the meaning behind those identifying factors, the meaning behind those and so on, until her identity is something not even she fully understands. To strangers, her appearance is her identity. They are free to attach whatever cultural stereotype to that appearance, and she can’t fight back. However, the risk of being misidentified as an individual is arguably better than not being identified as individual at all. Identities feed off of perception. If things are perceived in groups, then the individual identity is lost. This the case in both Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells, who, despite differences in nation, ethnicity, and time, use invisibility as a symbol for society’s inability to define an individual past her physical characteristics.
H.G. Wells and Ralph Ellison are two authors who overcame their differences in nation, time, and ethnicity to create novels that question how appearance contributes to the identity of an individual. H.G. Wells was born on the 21st of September 1866 in Bromley, Kent, England. When he was a young man, Wells moved to London and felt invisible in the large city, which inspired the invisibility in the novel (Beacham Group LLC). As a white man in the 1890s, Wells was not subject to any racial prejudice but he was poor and judge...

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...rom the rest of society. The girl also has very little power in making herself more or less visible to society if it’s against society’s wishes. Invisible Man shows that society sees what it wants to see, and it will place her in the category it wants to place in her in, regardless of whether or not it’s accurate. It will automatically assume that she will perform according to stereotype which leaves her lost among the crowd with no concrete identity of her own. Even when Griffin takes charge of his own invisibility he is still at the hands of society when it comes to whether or not he will be successful in his dictatorial pursuits. Therefore, neither character really creates their own power but rather is given certain amounts by their society. The power one person can muster up is insignificant in comparison to the power of society—the godlike power of perception.

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