Research Paper on:
Theme of Identity in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
as a "declaration of coherent identity...as a modern Bildungsroman" (Neighbors, 2002, p. 227). Ellison has stated, "In my novel, the narrators development is one through blackness to light...invisibility to visibility"  (Neighbors, 2002, p. 227). Based on this interpretation, Neighbors (2002) describes the chain of events related in the novel as "labyrinth designed to rob him of his identity" (p.  227). Likewise, Jackson (1999) describes the novel as charting a "nameless heros journey from conformity and spiritual blindness to freedom" (p. 71). An examination of this classic novel demonstrates how  the unnamed narrator of the novel emerges from the "labyrinth" of the self-knowledge to be confident within himself and resolved to act. Shinn (2002) points out that the "tropes  of invisibility" are all present in this narrative. The narrator is "invisible" to the whites of the community, i.e. to society at-large during this era, because African Americans are  not regarded as being fully human, as "people." African Americans and their accomplishments are systematically ignored in the same manner that the whites ignored furniture or animals. In order  for the narrator to not only survive, but to also become available to himself, "to reach beyond the culturally and ethnically circumscribed identity as victims and inferior human being,"  he must master the ability to live on the "borderlands, on the fault lines, and to write without depending on the founding myths of origins" (Krasteva, 1997, p. 56).  The novel opens with a prologue, in which the narrator has already completed his journey of self discovery and understand cultural invisibility that has plagued him. He tells the  reader how one can "ache with the need to convince yourself you do exist in the real world...and you swear to make them recognize you, And, also its seldom