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Ellison’s Naturalist Modernism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 November 2022
In Chapter 5, I turn to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Long understood in opposition to Richard Wright’s naturalism, Ellison’s work nevertheless retains its sense of social determination. Equal parts bildungsroman and picaresque, Invisible Man seems to undo every stable category it creates. Dominated by an idea of surplus that is both aesthetic and economic, the hallucinatory logic of Invisible Man represents a book-length dissection of our culture’s naturalization of race. In doing so, it reveals itself to be profoundly ambivalent about the protagonist’s search for his true self, which becomes, in this reading, a mark of his subjection to America’s racial imaginary. Like Beckett, then, Ellison presents a world with little hope, but his protest against catastrophe contains the negative image of a freedom currently impossible to attain.
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