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.


Read more about the novel:

Plot Outline/ Summary

Major Characters

Brother Jack

Themes

The Battle Royal Scene

The Golden Day Episode

The Liberty Paints Episode

Existential Vision

The Prologue and the Epilogue

Narrative Technique

Parody

Symbolism

Metaphor

Satire

Irony

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