Who knows the main content of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man!

The Invisible Man in Ralph Ellison (1952)

Ralph Ellison is a famous African-American novelist. 19 14 March 1 was born in Oklahoma city in the south-central United States. His father worked as a construction worker and a small trader. Alison lost her father at the age of 3 and was raised by her mother's maid. His mother often brought back some discarded old magazines and records from the White House where she was a maid, which made him interested in music and books since childhood. Oklahoma didn't become the 46th state in the United States until 1907. At that time, it was still full of frontier spirit and racial discrimination was not serious. Therefore, Ellison, as a black man, is sensitive to racial issues, but he has no sense of racial inferiority, and his hatred for whites is not as deep as that of other black writers who write protest novels. Since childhood, Ellison likes literature, movies, drama and jazz music. He once played the trumpet in a middle school band. He usually likes to compare his life with the lives of some characters in the novel, which seems to help him observe and understand life. 1933 won a national scholarship to study music and sculpture at tasker basic college for three years. His musical attainments are not only reflected in his later comments on music in Shadow and Walk (1964), but also have a positive impact on his language style in novel creation. Some people also wrote articles to discuss the relationship between his novels and jazz and blues. /kloc-went to new york to study sculpture in 0/936. When he met the famous writer richard wright, he started his literary creation with his encouragement. He did military service from 1943 to 1945. After demobilization, he was awarded the Rosenwald Research Fund, wrote the novel Invisible Man, and worked as a photographer, jazz drummer and hotel waiter to make a living. The novel was written for seven years, and 1952 was highly praised by critics after its publication, thus establishing the status of literature. Since then, Ellison has only published some short stories and critical articles, taught creative writing in some universities, and never published other important works.

I am invisible is the first sentence of the protagonist "I" in the novel to recall the past. "Please understand that others can't see me because they don't want to see me." This "I" hid in the basement of a white apartment in Harlem, secretly connected wires and installed 1369 lights, trying to make myself visible. "Maybe it's because I'm an invisible man, so I need light so much. Light confirmed my existence and gave me shape. " Light symbolizes the self and identity that I pursue. The whole book focuses on the process of "I" becoming invisible. "I" is a docile black boy, born and raised in the slave-holding southern United States. I have always respected white people. When I graduated from high school, I gave a speech at the ceremony to explain that the secret of progress lies in humility and was very successful. As a result, I was invited to give another speech at the gathering of white bosses in our town. Before the speech, "I" watched a white girl strip, and then black boys blindfolded and fought with each other. "I" was forced to attend, my eyes were swollen and my mouth was bleeding, but I still had to give a speech as usual. The speech of "I" was successful again, and I won a scholarship from a state black university. When I was in the third grade, a white school manager, Mr. Norton, visited the school. I was sent by the headmaster to go for a drive with the school leaders. Unfortunately, I met an incestuous black farmer and talked with Kan Kan, the school manager, about how he slept with his wife and daughter in Xiaotian because the house was cold, and how he accidentally climbed onto his daughter and made her pregnant. Strangely, although all the blacks around him crowded him out, the whites expressed sympathy for him. The school manager listened with relish. It turned out that the other side's narrative reminded him of his daughter's incest, so he rewarded the black farmer and let me drive to the hotel to drink. They went to the Golden Sun Restaurant, which was both a hotel and an inn. There were prostitutes and madmen (there was a madhouse nearby, and madmen often entertained themselves by drinking in the hotel accompanied by male nurses). A madman kept saying that Norton was his grandfather, and a prostitute came up to touch Norton's forehead and said that she liked white people like Norton best. A madman who used to be a doctor treated Norton and diagnosed him as hysterical. Frightened by the madman and prostitute, Norton ran out of the door and fled the hotel. As a result, his forehead was broken by salmon. After they returned to school, President Black flew into a rage when he saw the VIP injured, so he expelled me from school. His parting words were, "In order to seize power, you must be ruthless, pretend to please white bosses and pretend to be niggers." I went to new york to make a living after I got the recommendation letter. Who knows that no matter who looks at the recommendation letter, he shakes his head and shuts me out. Later, he learned that the headmaster said a lot of bad things about me in his letter. After many twists and turns, "I" was finally hired by a coating company. My job is to add ten drops of black liquid to each barrel of white paint and stir it vigorously to make it whiter and brighter. These white paints are ordered by the government and used to paint important national buildings such as monuments. Unfortunately, "I" put the wrong ingredients to make the white paint appear black, so I was transferred to burn the boiler. The foreman of the boiler room suspected that "I" was a trade union agent, and they had a fight, which caused the boiler to explode and almost killed me. After entering the hospital, the doctor regarded me as an experiment of a new machine, which not only made me lose my self easily obtained through work, but even made me lose my memory. After leaving the hospital, I met Mary, a kind-hearted black woman in Harlem, and rented a house in her house. With her help, I gradually adapted to the environment and recovered part of my "black identity". But "I" hate this identity. One day, I came across a black cast iron figure working as a doorman in my room. I take it as a symbol of self-mockery, pick it up and break it. I was going to throw it away, too. I threw it into someone else's trash can first, but the hostess saw it and asked me to pick it up on the spot. It turned out that "I" threw it in the middle of the road, was found back as a lost property, and handed it into my hands. I can't throw it away even if I want to. Once I was walking in the street and saw an old black couple being forced to move by the landlady. Furniture was randomly stacked on the side of the road, and a white policeman was carrying out his orders with dignity. A group of onlookers were outraged and prepared to use force against the police. With a complex psychology of hate and fear, "I" stepped forward and stopped: "Black brother, this is not the way. Our nation is law-abiding and does not get angry easily. " However, the white police stepped up their violence against the old couple. "I" couldn't bear to speak extemporaneously, inciting the masses to get up and beat off the police and move the furniture back to the apartment. My behavior attracted the attention of the radical organization Brotherhood, and I was invited to join this organization and its activities, feeling that I finally found myself. However, "I" soon discovered that the leader of this organization had poor knowledge and suspicious background. I am often ordered to do things I don't want to do, and I gradually lose myself: I vaguely feel that I have entered a dead end and become an invisible man. Some white sluts pursue me and regard me as a symbol of sexual function. A woman named Sybil was drunk and begged me to rape her, but I didn't touch her. I just wrote a few words on her drunken body with lipstick: "Sybil, you were raped by Santa Claus. I didn't expect it. " The activities of the Brotherhood were opposed by a group of black nationalists headed by Lars. The two sides are at odds, and they will fight to the death as soon as they meet. "I" participated in the struggle and was often forced to hide by Lars's people. Once, "I" hid in a grocery store and bought a pair of sunglasses and a wide-brimmed white hat to disguise myself, but suddenly I became Mr. Reinhardt and gained multiple identities such as hooligan, gambler, lover and priest. This caused me to think deeply: who am I, what is my identity, a pair of sunglasses and a white hat, how can I change from the original me to another person? Everyone is like this, no one is; Having all identities means having no identity-if so, "I" can be freed from any responsibility, whether it is for blacks or whites, for the north or the south, for the brotherhood or for people like Rastus. Since the outside world abandoned me and refused to recognize me, "I" had to turn my eyes to the inside world, from my venting and self-discovery. In a riot provoked by Lars, "I" fell into a hole when I escaped from danger, so I took this hole as my home, made a deep self-reflection, repeatedly thought about my place in the universe, and dictated this book.

Appreciation of Works This book is a classic in contemporary African-American literature, which has many characteristics of western contemporary novels: it puts forward the personal situation in the absurd universe and discusses the essence of self; Bold artistic innovation, the combination of realism and surrealism, and the use of black humor created a precedent for post-modern American literature. So as soon as this novel was published in 1932, it was immediately praised by British and American critics. Some people call it the best African-American novel I have ever read in my life, leaving the deepest impression. Others praised this book as the most characteristic of American literature. Delmo Schwartz, a famous American literary critic, even thinks that the existing literary criticism vocabulary is inevitably "superficial and grandiose" when it is used to comment on this book. After the publication of 13, Book Weekly, a major American book review weekly, invited 200 writers and critics to vote for the best American novel published after World War II. The unanimous selection of this book shows its great influence. On the theme, this book discusses the social alienation and self-alienation of human beings from the perspective of existentialism, and describes the psychological changes of the protagonist and the spiritual crisis of the Western Concession through the story of the protagonist's loss and self-seeking in an absurd and hostile environment. It is in this sense that the "invisible man" has a certain typicality and is regarded by western critics as "the model of contemporary people". Although the protagonist is black, the book also depicts the black life and racial discrimination in the society at that time. Organizers do not criticize or protest the racial problems in the subject's life from the perspective of sociology, but describe and reflect on the fate of people in modern society and the abnormal and unreasonable relationship between blacks and people with the concept of abstract humanity. In the author's opinion, nothing can better explain the self-alienation and absurd situation of human beings in hostile environment than African-Americans, so he takes African-Americans as an example to express the fate and situation of the whole human beings through the experience of "invisible people" and his ideological evolution. The central issue of existentialism is human status. In classical literature, man is a god and a hero; In modernist literature, people are ants, cowards, beggars and vagrants, and they are the "invisible people" of the protagonist in this book. Kafka described how people in modern society became beetles in Metamorphosis. In this book, Ellison also wrote in the same fable form that an ordinary black man without a first name and surname completely lost the meaning of self-existence under the oppression of hostile and alien environment, and finally became an "invisible man", in order to illustrate that human self-alienation has reached the level of nothingness. In today's western society, spiritual civilization has encountered more and more profound crisis. People become machines, and individuals can't control their own destiny. Western writers feel that today's world is incomprehensible and have no intention to understand it, so they turn their description focus to the inner world of the characters, deliberately expressing personal depravity and spiritual emptiness. The writer himself often treats everything with a sad, desperate and angry attitude, and reflects its twists and turns with a surreal and exaggerated brushwork called "black humor" by some critics. Alison also tends to regard today's world as an absurd world where reality and dreams are intertwined, so when describing this world, she also adopts a new method of combining realism and surrealism, and abstracts or caricatures the real world with confusing brushstrokes. According to the needs of creative practice, the author uses everything that can serve his novels, from realism to symbolism, impressionism, expressionism and surrealism. The whole story happened between consciousness and unconsciousness, and the reality was like a nightmare. The external world often exaggerates or distorts through black humor, and the result can better reflect its internal essence. The author is good at revealing the chaos of American society and the gap between people by symbolic means. With the growth of age and experience, the protagonists from the south to the north are more and more aware of the madness and absurdity of this world, and the author's style changes accordingly, from realism to expressionism to surrealism, using different techniques and techniques to reflect the inner world of the protagonist and the material world that is both realistic and unrealistic in his eyes. This book is also unique in the use of language. The living environment of the protagonist has changed, and the narrative language has also changed. The Bible, classical literature, blues songs, the rhetoric of southern whites, and black slang in Harlem are all used properly. This book is narrated in the first person, and the language is both colloquial and visual. An American critic believes that "no American writer has been able to create such a rich and humorous spoken language since Mark Twain."