Invisisble Man
Developing self-knowledge is a gradual, lifelong process. Each situation that an individual faces helps him or her to define a personal identity. Over the course of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the nameless protagonist develops through several stages from a confident yet naive student, to a degraded factory worker, to a member of a fraternal organization, and finally to a self-assured individual. Throughout his development, he looks to others to answer questions about his identity; in the end, however, he realizes that he can only depend on and trust in himself for self-knowledge.Early in the novel, the young invisible man yearns to be seen by others for his true self. A young man of African-American descent, he is invisible "because people refuse to see [him]. It is as though [he is] surrounded by mirrors of hard-distorted glass," and when people "approach [him], they see only [his] surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination-indeed everything except [him]"(Ellison 3). He becomes very frustrated and "aches with the need to convince [himself] that [he] does exist in the real world, that [he is] part of all the sound and anguish, and [he] strikes out with [his] fists, [he] curses and [he] swears to make th
At college, the invisible man tries to win the approval of Norton, a wealthy white trustee. The doctors' refusal to recognize the narrator as a person pushes his fragile state even further down. He expects that he can look to others to tell him who he is. The invisible man is attracted to the Brotherhood and its communal ideology because he does not want to struggle alone any longer. At the end of his process of self-discovery, rather than offering a single definition of himself, the invisible man paints a portrait of many selves. At the hospital, he is treated brutally by uncaring white doctors. "Why should I worry about bureaucrats, blind men?" I am invisible," he declares (Ellison 528). He begins to realize that he can't live up to others' expectations of him. In actuality, the letters are warnings to prospective employees saying that the narrator has been "expelled [from the college] for a most serious defection of [the] strictest rules of deportment" (Ellison, 10). In order to stay sane, the young protagonist convinces himself that he has some importance to others. Throughout his life, he has subscribed to different ideologies; however, each ideology demanded that he submit his identity to a definition determined by others.
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