엘리슨의 『보이지 않는 사람』: 자아 발견으로서의 여행

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as a Voyage of Self -discovery

The purpose of this paper is to elucidate Ellison's artistic devices in his unique novel, Invisible Man and explicate its theme, the search for a young black man's identity and self-discovery. Ellison's Invisible Man(1952) is universally regarded as the established classic of modem American novel. It is also a novel about the disappearance of self and the collapse of moral perspective. This semi-biographical account of a black man's gradual self-discovery remains only major work to date. His novel combines elements of realism, naturalism, surrealism, and folklore. He draws on the literary tradition of such great writers as William Faulkner, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot as well as the native tradition of the blues in his Bildungsroman about a nameless black narrator in search of an identity. Set in the 1930' s, the book details his often incoherent experiences as a bright high-school student in the south, as a disoriented college student expelled from southern negro college, as a factory worker in New York city, and as a rising figure in left wing politics. His life is marked by various traumas of racial and individual identity, but it is through these experiences that he eventually achieves self-consciousness. He realizes that black skin in American society masks one "invisible" to white eyes. The novel's climax recounts a race riot in Harlem, during which the narrator observes both the destructiveness of black nationalism and the failure of communist attempts to reform society. He retreats, in his invisibility, to an underground sewer. At the end of the novel he is better off in one respect than when he began. His awareness of the social phenomenon of "invisibility" has provided him with the possibility for free personal action.