After he undergoes the treatment, a man begins to ask him questions about his identity, the first one being his name. After an explosion at the Liberty Paints plant sends the narrator sends him to the plant’s hospital, the narrator is forced to undergo electroshock therapy against his own will. As the novel progresses, society continues to further damage his identity by altering his name. However, the treatment of the narrator’s name does not simply end with keeping it hidden from the readers and the characters inside of the novel. Order custom essay Invisible Man By Ralph Waldo Ellison Analysis By refusing to reveal something so simple yet so monumental to a person’s identity, Ellison is able to show readers how American society still perpetuates the notion that African Americans are not fully human by overlooking such basic aspects of black identity. This establishes his name as something trivial to the reader as well as the people he encounters throughout the plot of the novel. The narrator never explicitly states his name, and even in the only instance that he actually does it is masked from the reader by the “roar of the furnaces” of the Liberty Paints plant(Ellison 208). The most notable lack of information about the narrator that readers will notice is his name. One of the most prevalent themes of the novel is the protagonist’s search for identity(Tracy 36) Throughout the novel, Ellison uses several methods of description, or more accurately lack of describing the narrator to illustrate how he has been losing his identity throughout the events of the novel. This dehumanization of black characters and the overall treatment of African Americans during his life motivated him to write a novel displaying how society overlooks black identity. He also saw that literary works of his time did not use minority characters as “literary symbols but as petrified objects that embody contemporary ideological notions of race”(Purcell 35).

Because of their beliefs they continually overlooked the monumental impacts minorities have had in American history. However, despite this, he noticed that even after the Civil War, society continued to perpetuate the ideology that whites were superior to minorities in every way. Ralph Ellison saw America as “a fluid multicultural democracy”(Banner-Haley 165) filled with people from all around the world.

Ellison uses the narrator’s struggles throughout the novel to show how American society perpetuates racist political and social ideologies. Through the narrator’s experiences, Ellison is able to tell a complex narrative that ends with the narrator realizing that American society views him as invisible, a theme prevalent throughout the book. Ralph Ellison’s novel, Invisible Man, is a story about a black man’s experiences with racism in America, from the novel’s beginning in the South and its end in Harlem.

Emerson invisible man