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Dialect
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis:
In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison mixes the conventions of various genres. The novel is generally identified as a modernist novel due to its experimental style, including various dream-like or hallucinatory scenes and a tendency to jump forward and backward in time in a nonlinear fashion. Additionally, The Invisible Man contains strong elements of social criticism and political satire, offering caricatures, or satirical sketches, of various political groups and ideologies that were prominent in the New York City of the mid-20th century. Primarily, however, the novel is a bildungsroman, or a novel of education that follows the intellectual and moral growth of its protagonist. In the first chapter, the narrator describes his upbringing, highlighting what he considers to be his earlier naïveté:
All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!
Here, the narrator discusses himself as a teenager. He turned to various authorities to better understand what it was he wanted from life, and he “accepted” these answers uncritically, trusting the judgment of others. Acknowledging that he was “naïve,” the narrator states that it took him a “long time” and many “painful” experiences to learn to trust his own judgment. More surprisingly, he claims that it was necessary for him to learn that he is “invisible” as a racialized subject in the United States. The narrator's gradual, painful growth in self-understanding clearly places Invisible Man in the bildungsroman genre.
Related Themes:
