Abstract
Born in Oklahoma City in 1914, his earliest aspirations were musical. After graduation; Ellison was accepted to
Booker T. Washington‟s Tuskegee Institute in 1933.Like his Invisible Man Ellison received a scholarship from the town‟s leading white men in order to attend college. Ellison wrote his first piece, which he then published in his journal, “New Challenge”.Ralph Ellisons critical and artistic reputation rests largely on a single masterpiece, his first and only novel Invisible Man (1952). It took seven years to complete.Ellison‟s second work was a book of essays entitled Shadow and Act, published in 1964.The Collected essays of Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan was published posthumously in 1995. At his death in 1994 he left a literary legacy that could well be sustained on the force of his single published novel alone. Invisible Man (1952) was well received, earning Ellison, the National Book Award in 1953. In an oft-cited poll, Invisible Man was named the most distinguished novel of the past twenty-five years. In Ellison‟s view black and white culture were in extricable linked, with almost every facet of American life influenced and impacted by the African-American presence. The universality and accomplishment of Ellisons writing can be seen in the breadth of his continuing influence on other writers, from Toni Morrison and Charles Johnson to Kurt Vonnegut and the late Joseph Heller. Fifty years after the publishing of Invisible Man Ralph Ellison‟s voice continues to speak to all of us. Confusion and the agony of the Black community is very well portrayed through Invisible Man whose role in always defined by others. As Irving commented no other writer has captured so much of the confusion and agony, the hidden gloom and surface gaiety of Negro life. In this paper I propose to discuss how ideologies exploit the Black community especially with the individual personality and how the blacks are betrayed and suppressed by their own race.The narrator difficulties throughout the novel are associated with his race, invisible man is a novel aimed at transcending race and all the other ways humanity has used to categorize people.
Keywords
Racism
Individual identity
Ideology
Liberty paints plant
Reference
1. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man 1952 (Indian Edition) New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1976 print.
2. Andrews, William & Smith, France & Harris, Foster Truier.ed. The Concise OxfordCompanion to African American Literature. New York: Oxford University press, 201.Print
3. Payne, Ladell. Black Novelists and the Southern Literary Tradition, USA: University of Georgia Press, 1982. Print
4. Ploski, Harry. A. & Williams, James. ed. The Negro Almanac: A Reference Work on the African American (fifth
edition) New York: Gale Research Inc, 1989. Print.