Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" as a Bildungsroman (novel of growth/development)
In the traditional European
prototype, coming-of-age is charted through the representation of ordeals and
life lessons which the young protagonist or Bildungsheld must overcome
in order to achieve their harmonious course of maturation. The American model forgoes
this necessity of harmony. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)
is one such coming-of-age narrative, following the pedagogical and experiential
education of an African American adolescent in the 1920s and 30s. Ellison
subverts the inefficiencies of representing race in American literature and
culture that had come before him. At the same time, the author illuminates the
hypocrisies of racial and ideological identity politics in a post-Abolition
American society.
The linear temporality of the
traditional Bildungsroman form is subverted by Ellison’s reflexive use of
direct, first person narration in the present and past tense, featuring an
ironic use of the in medias res technique with flashbacks. It is indeed
ironic because traditionally, in medias res suggests a narrative that
begins in action; this novel, however, opens with a protagonist who has
retreated into hibernated inaction.
In the traditional Bildungsroman,
the protagonist’s goal is to find a meaningful position within the production
of capitalism through bourgeois employment and adherence to the social
institutions of marriage and the nuclear family. But here the Invisible Man’s
task is a tactical retreat: "[I]t is incorrect to assume that, because I’m
invisible and live in a hole, I am dead", he assures the reader. "I am neither
dead nor in a state of suspended animation. Call me Jack-the-Bear, for I am in
a state of hibernation."
The battle
royal episode functions as a dystopic formulation of the traditional
Bildungsroman rites of passage where, according to Barbara Foley, "naïve
protagonists, usually young, encounter various trials that enable them to test
their mettle. They undergo apprenticeships in the lessons of life and emerge
older and wiser". The Invisible
Man’s ‘authentic’ life lessons at college occur when he is commissioned to
chauffeur a white founding father, Mr. Norton, on a revisitation tour of the
campus. On this occasion, Norton represents a guiding, masculine figure
attempting to mould the destiny of the young protagonist, so that the Goethean
Bildungsheld might follow in the traditional Bildungsroman form.
Künstlerroman is a novel about an
artist’s growth to maturity; it often depicts the tension between a sensitive
youth and the values of a worldly society. The Invisible Man conforms to the Joycean prototype
of the artist figure in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man (1916).
Like Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s novel, the Invisible Man is young and ambitious. The Invisible Man as a
sensitive young scholar faced with a corrupt, uncaring society is in many ways
an artist, a young rhetorician in particular.
As a Erziehungsroman (novel
of pedagogical education), Invisible Man is concerned with education at different levels.
On one level, the Invisible Man is to gain the life experience necessary for his maturity. As
such, the novel celebrates the initiation rite of the passage from innocence to
experience. On another level, the novel presents the problematic of “Negro”
education, a necessary element in racial uplift. Kenneth Burke discusses
Invisible Man as a Bildungsroman in the tradition of a prototype like Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister. Burke discusses the major pattern of a Bildungsroman of a
character’s “progressive education from ‘apprenticeship’ through
‘journeymanship’ toward an ideal of ‘mastery’". Such a pattern, Burke
argues, is based on the Invisible Man’s experiences in the South and then in the North. Burke
argues that Ellison’s ‘apprentice’ in the South was “docile and thus
‘teachable’”. The education he received under Bledsoe was a
“‘teachable-docile’ kind of education” by way of preparing young blacks for a
dominant white culture. However, Ellison seems critical of this
education as it is often conflated with miseducation. Therefore, Deitze is right to call the novel a “reversed Bildungsroman” as the Invisible Man is subjected to bad,
false education. His true education, Deitze argues, begins when he
actually “un-learned what the Bledsoes, Nortons, and Jacks wanted him to learn”
by shedding the false identities and notions he had acquired or imbibed.
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