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Ralph Ellison's The Unchanged, Invisible World

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The Unchanged, Invisible World Ralph Ellison opens up on the reality of 20th century America in his novel, The Invisible Man. In this, an unnamed African American comes to understand the dark truth of the world around him. Originally hopeful with his aspirations, the narrator instead succumbs to the peril of racism that looms over society. He then embarks on a journey that sends him on the path to discovering the ideologies of not just the parochial majority that is white society, but of his own mind as well. Similar to what is felt by the narrator, the story highlights many hardships relevant since the 1900s. Affecting all facets of society, struggles that include bigotry, negligence, and the search for identity assert just how similar today’s …show more content…

Throughout the majority of the story, the narrator laments how he feels left out of society, almost as if he were unseen. Minority groups as a whole were subject to improper care and attention in comparison to others, leading to a clear discrepancy in opportunity. The narrator spends all of the prologue addressing this issue, opening up the novel with “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me” (Ellison 1). The man acknowledges how he is capable of being seen by other people, but they choose not to. Consequently, he succumbs to the lack of attention as his image slowly deteriorates away from the public eye. Invisibility is what defines this man through his hardships, so invisible that he remains nameless to the reader from start to finish. It is moments like in the hospital that the man comes to terms with his image, when forced to respond to the question of who he is by the white doctors. As the story progresses, the narrator continuously comes to fully understand his invisibility and its relation to the rest of society. He uses it as a stepping stone to engage with his white oppressors, as critic Edward Margolies notes how “he will pretend to agree to his invisibility until reality strikes down the white man for his obdurate blindness… with him recogniz[ing] first that he is invisible—and second, that he is a man” (Margolies). With this, the narrator plans to take the blindness held by the white majority and use that as an advantage to making a platform for civil rights. It is what leads him to becoming an activist, rallying many other African Americans together to advance their common goals in Harlem. This group becomes rather controversial, where at the end of the book the headquarters of the Brotherhood gets destroyed due to a public riot. The narrator stumbles upon this mess, consequently being chased by two police officers. Running, he eventually finds himself down a manhole

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