The Western and Eastern thoughts of Ralph Ellison's invisible man

Yoshinobu Hakutani

pp. 111-128

in: Yoshinobu Hakutani (ed), Cross-cultural visions in African American literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011

Abstrakt

Among the well-known twentieth-century African American novels, Invisible Man (1952) has distinguished itself as unique racial discourse. As a novel of racial prejudice, Richard Wright's Native Son had succeeded in awakening the conscience of the nation in a way that its predecessors had failed to do. Toni Morrison's celebrated novel Beloved (1987) is perhaps one of the most poignant recreations of the legacy of slavery. For the expression of an African American woman's love and suffering, Alice Walker's The Color Purple (1982) excels in its use of a vernacular as does Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told by an innocent, uneducated youth. Such novelists as Wright, Morrison, and Walker have succeeded in recording the ineffable agonies and rages of racial victims only because their works are solidly based on fact and history. None of these novels, however, concerns the mindset of an individual more subtly than does Invisible Man. And this novel, unlike other African American novels, features the complexity of the protagonist's mind thoroughly foregrounded with a cross-cultural heritage. Invisible Man, then, represents the confluence and hybridity of Western and Eastern thoughts.

Cited authors

Ellis Ralph