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英語(yǔ)論文范文-The Symbolism of Identity in the Novel
英語(yǔ)論文范文-The Symbolism of Identity in the Novel
Symbolism, one of the exquisite arts embodied in the novel, helps to reveal the affluent themes. Ralph Ellison incorporates numerous symbols to draw the outline of major characters and express their inner minds via depicting the concrete objects. The Identity-Seeking course of the invisible man encompasses the Identity crisis or the failure of Identity to the quest for Identity. The nameless man underwent a lot of incidents and was imposed on enormous identities by others, and came to the partial acceptance of his Identity. Ellison enumerates various identities in the novel by way of symbolism, which vividly depicts a common man’s quest for Identity in the universal theme.
2.1 The Definition of Identity
Identity, one of the important concepts of the western culture, mainly means the acceptance of individuality and the specific social culture. It comprises the Individual Identity, Collective Identity, Self Identity and Social Identity. In a broader sense, Identity is the collective Identity’s choice between superior and inferior culture, with the corresponding shock and spiritual suffering (趙一凡等 2006: 465).
W.E.B Du Bois thought that African-Americans face with the conflict from the Black and American Identities. The Blacks try to internalize the American Identity and discern their Black Identity. “One ever feels his twoness—an American a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (1984: 3).
We know that one’s Identity is formed through the relationship with others, just as what Ellison said: “what makes you a Negro is having grown up under certain culture conditions, of having undergone an experience that shapes your culture” (net 2007). Because of their misery or even so-called disaster, the Black people are more endurable, brave and diligent; because of the unique culture, Black people have their psychology and peculiar circumstances under which they have lived generation by generation.
2.2 The Identity Crisis in the Novel
Since the World WarⅡ,the holocaust of the Jews held by the Nazi, the terror of wars and the appearance of nuclear bomb, have aroused doubts of people for the traditional value advocated by the Capitalists. People saw the world as the absurd, hostile, unknown and saw human being as the lonely one. The alienation and Identity Crisis came out the most important theme in their daily life.
In the absurd world, men become more and more alienated with each other. The invisible man has no other relatives but his grand father. His nuclear family is essentially nonexistent in both physical and psychological sense. When he is kicked out of the college, he does not go home or ask for comfort from his parents. He has no true friends or classmates as well. It seems that he lives in his world alone, keeping no contact with others. No one cares about his life. In the brotherhood or in the family, he is a lonely man, and also he can not get any help from anyone when he is forced to live underground. The only kin to him is his grandfather, who only leaves him death bed words. The closest friend of his is Mary who helps and takes care of him, but the nameless boy leaves her without telling her where he is going. In short, he has no real home, no real family and no friends.
Moreover, he even is the “invisible man”, without his own identity but the identities imposed by others independent of his own mind. At last, he acknowledges that he is no body but one committed by others to do something. The Identity process can be divided into three steps: firstly, he should doubt whether he has an identity; secondly, he may suffer from identity crisis; thirdly, he can make commitments. The failure in seeking the identity makes him lose the direction and land in a predicament of identity crisis, with which he begins his arduous quest for identity.
2.3 The Quest for Identity
The novel chronicles the growth journey of a young man, which is actually a search for his own identity and the meaning of his existence. It includes “the classic novelistic theme: the search of the innocent hero for knowledge of reality, self and society” (Chase, 2005: 35).
In the novel Invisible Man, we can make a tentative classification to three parts of his quest for Identity and discuss each symbolic meaning.
1) From Innocent to Experience
Throughout the book, the invisible man moves from innocence to experience, from repression to expression. He starts out as an ignorant young student. At the end of the novel, he accepts his identity as being an invisible man and sees that people like his grandfather. Trueblood, Mary and he himself are of ultimate value. The experience is gained by a series of disillusionments he undergoes during his journey. The more conscious a person of his cultural, personal and national history, the freer he becomes.
At first, despite his grandfather’s warning, the invisible man believes that genuine obedience will win him respect and praise. He is finally rewarded with a scholarship and a brief case for his obedient behavior. The battle royal episode exemplifies the novel’s motifs of blindness and masks. The boy’s literal blind-folding in the ring parallels the men’s metaphorical blindness as they watch the fight. The naked girl, the fight, the counterfeit coins symbolize that Blacks are only toys in the white people’s eyes. They do not have any human identity at all. However, the nameless man doesn’t recognize it at the beginning. His only thought is to deliver the speech which he thinks the white would enjoy and praise him, of course, it is not true.
In college he becomes committed to the version of American dream. He virtually worship administers and trustees, who are the embodiments of material success. Dr. Bledsoe, who he admires, characterizes the famous rags-to-riches formula.
“He was the example of everything I hope to be: “influential with wealthy men all over the country; consulted in matters concerning the race; a leader of his people, the possessor of not one, but two Cadillaes, a good salary and a soft, good-looking and creamy-complexioned wife.” (Ellison 2002: 101)
However, his deferential and scrupulous demeanor is only a deceptive appearance, which is a kind of performance. Because he wants to please the white by all means, he would expel the protagonist for an unreal fact that the narrator “dragged the entire race into the slime”.
During the first days in New York City, he believes Mr. Bledsoe’s letters would introduce him to an easy and suitable employment. He trusts these letters very much for they are about him and they are addressed to men with impressive names. Again, shocked at the revelation of the letters, he recognizes that this version of the American dream will never work for him.
The narrator again plunges himself into the illusion and belief that he is visible in other’s eyes and that he can achieve a meaningful identity through his efforts. He then discards his past and accepts a new name. However, he finds that Brotherhood simply considers that he is a tool of them to achieve their ends, and the purpose of Brotherhood is not to relieve the plight of blacks but “we do not shape our policies to the mistaken and infantile notions of the man in the street. Our job is not to ask them what they think but to tell those” (Ellison 2002: 473).
2) From the Rejection to Acceptance of the Past
The quest for Identity the invisible man makes is also the great shift in his attitude toward his own culture, at first he would like to discard the tradition and worship the western culture, and then the enlightenment he gains teaches him that to forget one’s past is to forget one’s history. Losing his past or history means the loss of himself, the loss of his own identity as well. History is closely related to himself.
The blindness to the fact makes the narrator hold fast his ridiculous American Dream. In order to step into the White world and gain the White’s recognition, he wants to get rid of what is associated with “Black”. For example, he wants to forget his grandfather’s beddeath words he is ashamed of, which symbolizes that he refuses to seek for Self-Identity. He is most ashamed and contemptuous of black music when he is in the south for the reason it is related to the past of slavery. After his arrival in the North, he decides to change his southern accent completely into that of the North just in order to identify himself with the people there. He even refuses to eat his favorite food and orders coffee and bread. He smashes a coin bank because it looks like a grinning black man with “Feed me” across its chest.
All the actions symbolize the intention of the narration to break from the past without knowing the true reality of the world he inhabits in. After experiencing all kinds of incidents, he gradually comes close to the truth: he couldn’t forget the past, he is enlightened by the people around him and the events happened around him. He recalls his grandfather’s advice several times when he confronts a conflict or dilemma.
On the day of the first winter snow, he emerges from his safe retreat and encounters an old street vendor named petite wheat straw who bakes yams in an improvised oven. The yellow sweet potatoes and the fragrance remind him of past days when he usually enjoyed it in the south. He buys first one and then two more hot baked yams with melted butter, eating them in the sight of everyone. Buying baked yams and eating them as he strolls along, he openly asserts his kinship with the blacks and his southern origin. Ellison sees the folk tradition, the spirituals, blues, jazz and folk-tales as a stable factor in “the discontinuous swiftly changing and diverse American culture”.
“I walked along, munching the yam, just as suddenly overcome by an intense feeling of freedom—simply because I was eating while walking along the street. It was exhilarating, I no longer had to worry about who saw me or about what was proper. To hell with all that, and as sweet as the yam actually was, it became like nectar with the thought. If only someone who had known me at school or at home would come along and see me now. How shocked they’d be! I’d push them into a side street and smear their faces with the peel.” (Ellison 2002: 264)
His acceptance of Blues helps him keep his identity in the fast and maddening North. Blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically. Blues expresses both the agony of life and the possibility of overcoming it through sheer toughness of spirit. All the Black writers have agreed that the Blues has been a survival mechanism for the Africans and also that it has been the greatest contribution to American art. For Ellison, the Blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing it from a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.
On his way to see Mr. Emerson, the invisible man meets a man pushing a cart piles roll of blue paper and singing a blues. He at first rejects hearing the Blues, however, when the invisible man goes out of Emerson’s office and on a bus, a man sitting in front of him is constantly whistling a tune. Getting off the bus, he finds himself humming the same tune “well they picked poor robin clean”, now, he is accepting his black birth.
At the end of the novel the invisible man is speaking an idiom infused by the Blues, which symbolizes that he has learned to cherish the black folk tradition and begins to understand that his identity is deeply rooted in black American history. Also, the preservation of Brother Tarp’s chain link, the coin bank, all embody the enlightenment the invisible man gets in his quest for identity.
3) From the Submission to the Protest
The protagonist in his own town is viewed as an obedient and humble boy. The oration he deliverers on his graduation—Humility was the Secret, indeed the Very Essence of Progress is the best example of his submission. The protagonist holds the respect and envy for administers and trustees. He virtually worships them, and he is proud of his submissiveness to the white, which won him a scholarship and a briefcase. He tries to please the trustee by being a good and servile student. He respects the trustee Norton for the latter’s generosity and apparently kindness to him. He prides himself on being a driver for Norton, he thinks that he must seize this opportunity to please the trustee “perhaps he’d give me a large tip, or a suit, or a scholarship next year” (Ellison 2002: 38).
Though at first he is angry with his expulsion from the school ordered by the Dr. Bledsoe, and he confronts it with the Dr. Bledsoe but later he tries to convince himself to accept the decision for the “wrong deed”,
“Somehow, I convinced myself, I had violated the code and thus would have to submit to punishment. Dr. Bledsoe is right, I told myself, he is right; the school and what it stands for have to be protected. There was no other way, and no matter how much I suffered I would pay my debt as quickly as possible and return to building my career.” (Ellison 2002: 147)
Again, he submits himself to the Brotherhood, when Brotherhood gives him the house, the money, and a name, which promise a new beginning for him to achieve his goal. By doing this, he chooses to disarm himself, give up his voice, forget his past and accept the organization’s offer—a chance to define himself. Similarly, when he receives an anonymous letter to give him a warning to watch his words or deeds, which is, actually, a threatening letter to restrict him, but he convinces himself to trust the Brotherhood and convinces that the reproach indicating their belief in him, not their discontent with him,
“And, after all, I told myself, the assignment was also proof of the committee’s good will. For by selecting me to speak with its authority on a subject which elsewhere in our society I’d have found taboo, weren’t they reaffirming their belief both in me and in the principles of Brotherhood, proving that they drew no lines even when it came to women? They had to investigate the charges against me, but the assignment was their unsentimental affirmation that their belief in me was unbroken.” (Ellison 2002: 408)
As the unveiling of the truth to him, he gradually approaches the reality, and he gets rid of his submissiveness and humbleness and takes some actions to voice his protest.
The death of Clifton shocks the narrator greatly, he begins to doubt about the principle of Brotherhood and discern the true purpose, and then he feels sympathy and respect for Clifton, thus he hold a funeral for him to express his support and reverence for him, which violates Brotherhood of course.
Staying in the underground, he burns the papers in the Calfskin Briefcase—his psychological baggage, also the papers in it imply his Identity, just as the protagonist says at the end of the novel, “….and, as I said before, a decision has been made, I’m shaking off the old shin and I’ll leave it here in the hole. I’m coming out, no less invisible without it, but coming out nevertheless….” (Ellison 2002: 581). Ellison speaks of the need to burn out the past, “before he could have some voice in his own destiny, he had to discard these old identity and illusions, his enlightenment” (Frederick 1985: 191).
The invisible man’s progress turns out to be a pilgrimage to the discovery of his identity. The encapsulation of his sufferings throughout the whole novel does speak out the main source of his life as an invisible man. He says:
“My problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.” (Ellison 2002: 573)
The protagonist is not only a black man, but also a complex American searching for the existence in a technological society characterized by swift change.
2.4 The Embodiment of the Symbolism of Identity
In this novel, the protagonist assumes many identities imposed by other people. Just as Ellison in the Shadow and Act says that each section begins with a sheet of paper, each piece of paper is exchanged for another and contains a definition of his Identity or the social role to play as defined for him. All of them imply the same meaning, “keep this nigger boy running” (1995: 176-7).
1) Various Identities in the Novel
Of all the identities, like Norton and Bledsoe, Jack in Brotherhood treats him as a tool that suits their own needs and doesn’t view him as man with human feelings but just as an image.
“Here I had thought the Brotherhood accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn’t see either color or men…for all they were concerned, we were so many names scribbled on fake ballots, to be used at their convenience and when not needed to be filed away. It was a joke, an absurd joke. And now I look around a corner of my mind and saw Jack and Norton and Emerson merge into one single white figure. They were very much the same each attempting to force his pictured of reality upon me and neither giving a boot in hell for how things looked to me. I was simply a material, a natural resource to be used.” (Ellison 2002: 508)
a) In the town of south, he is viewed as an obedient black boy in the eyes’ of the town’s big shots, just as what he says in the oration humility was the secret, indeed the very essence of progress. He naively thinks that the white men really enjoy his speech, however, they view it as an amusement, a play, a funny thing as battle royal, the naked girl and the struggle to pick up the coins.
b) To the white trustee Norton, he is just the fruit of Norton’s generosity or the beneficiary. He said that:” I felt even as a young man that your people were somehow closely connected with my destiny” (Ellison 2002: 41) “You are my fate, young man” (Ellison, 2002: 42) However, as the Vet in the Golden Day reveals that the fact when he discuss the protagonist’s destiny with Mr. Norton.
“Poor stumbles, neither of you can see the other. To you he is a mark on the score card of your achievement, a thing and not a man; a child, or even less----a black amorphous thing. And you, for all your power are not a man to him, but a God, a force----I can tell you his destiny. He’ll do your bidding, and for that his blindness is his chief asset. He’s your man, friend, your man and your destiny.” (Ellison 2002: 95)
c) In the hospital, he is the experiment for the new machine, and people take no regard for his thought, or his situation. “The machine will produce the results of a prefrontal lobotomy without the negative effects of the knife…..and the result is as complete a change of personality as you’ll find in your famous fairy tale cases of criminals transformed into amiable fellows after all that bloody business of a brain operation.” “But what of his psychology?” “Absolutely of no importance…” (Ellison 2002: 236), he is just the object but not a human to take care of.
d) The new name, new identity the Brotherhood gives him are the declaration of departing from his former life, which he views as the new beginning for him and the manifestation of the Brotherhood’s respect for him. Again, he is just a tool for the advancement of the Brotherhood’s aims. The anonymous letter threatens him to take care of his words and deeds. The criticism for his behavior when he holds a funeral for the Clifton annoys him. He is just the toy the Brotherhood controlled to lead him do what they want, once violated, they would impose punishment on him.
e) While confronting with the Harlem riot, he wears dark glasses and a hat, only to find that people on the streets regard him as the man Rinehart, the runner, the gambler, the briber, the lover and the preacher. He is all things to all people but not himself.
f) Finally, he discovers his invisibility in the underground. He burns the paper in the briefcase and admits that he is nobody but an invisible man. The various identities enlighten him that one’s true Identity is the sum of one’s experiences. To deny one’s past is to deny himself,
“It was as though I’d learned suddenly to look around corners: images of past humiliations flickered through my head and I saw that they were more than separate experiences. They were me; they defined me. I was my experiences and my experience was me, and no blind men, no matter how powerful they became, even if they conquered the world, could take that, or change one single itch, taunt, laugh, cry, scar, ache, rage or pain of it.” (Ellison 2002: 508)
The symbolical meaning for those various identities is very obvious. All these symbolize the invisibility of a common black man in this indifferent, alienated world. In order to find the true self, the first step is to find and realize one’s invisibility.
2) Other Symbols of Identity
Symbols are the most valuable components in the expression of themes in the novel. Ellison incorporates numerous symbols and archetypes into his novel, each providing a unique perspective on the narrative and supporting the dominant themes of invisibility and identity.
a) Boomerang
In prologue, the protagonist mentions the boomerang:
“But that is taking advantage of you, those two spots are among the darkest of whole civilization—pardon me, our whole culture (an important distinction, I’ve heard)—which might sound like a hoax, or a contradiction, but that is how the world moves” not like an arrow but a boomerang. I know; I have been boomeranged across my head so much that I now can see the darkness of lightness.” (Ellison 2002: 6)
Boomerang is a curved flat wooden missile which can be thrown and it returns to the thrower if it fails to hit anything. In the novel, Boomerang symbolizes the curved tendency of the protagonist’s fate: he is in other’s hands including Dr. Bledsoe, Brother Jack and so on. No matter how big efforts he has made, he has no chance to be himself under their control. He has been destined to suffer the agony through all life’s ups and downs.
b) Brother Tarp’s chain links
Brother Tarp, a man has been imprisoned for 19 years because he dared to say” No” to a white man. He gives protagonist a batter chain links he was forced to wear as an inmate. The chain links to Brother Tarp symbolizes his freedom from physical as well as mental slavery. To the protagonist, he draws the strength from the links and gradually changes his attitude towards the history of his forefather. In the university, he is unwilling to look back at the past slavery history, “I recalled only a few cracked relics from slavery times….they had not been pleasant and whenever I had visited the room I avoided the glass case in which they rested…and I had not looked even at these too often” ( Ellison 2002: 181). However, he realizes that what is essential in his life.
c) Tod Clifton’s dancing doll
The mambo doll represents degrading black stereotype and the damaging power of prejudice.
“a grinning doll of orange-and-black tissue paper with thin flat cardboard disks forming its head and feet and which some mysterious mechanism was causing to move up and down in a loose-jointed, shoulder-shaking, infuriatingly sensuous motion, a dance that was completely detached from the black, mask-like face. It ‘s no jumping –jack, but what I thought, seeing the doll throwing itself about with the fierce defiance of someone performing a degrading act in public…” (Ellison 2002: 431)
The black dolls can dance because they are controlled by an invisible thread. It’s a metaphor which implies that the Black members of the Brotherhood are manipulated unwittingly by the white superiors, and it also implies that African-Americans continue to live like marionettes, whose motions determined by white puppeteers. The stereotypes and expectation of a racist society compel them to behave only in certain ways, to move according to certain patterns, never allowing them to act according to their own wills. The sambo doll represents an invisible deterioration of African-Americans in American society.
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