Invisible Man Ralph Ellison Cultural Heritage

Ralph Ellison’s only novel Invisible Man was published in 1952. The richness of the novel lines in the cultural heritage present through the African American experience. Irving Howe describes the novel as “drenched in Negro life, talk, music.” As an African American, Ralph Ellison embraced all the particularities of being black in a country where slavery is over, yet one could affirm there is no equal rights. After the study of the novel one could say that the main theme in Invisible Man is the quest of identity as a black person into the American society. Furthermore, The narrator, being the main character of the book, goes through different situations (that were deceptions and betrayals) and different meetings and gain consciousness from them. He grew up being around different cultures, Yoshinobu Hakutani3 talks about a “cross-cultural heritage.” (44) However, we may define at first place cultural heritage. One may understand that:

“Cultural heritage does not end at monuments and collections of objects. It also includes traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants, such as oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts.”

The novel allows the reader to understand the black people and the culture they kept as a strength and as a way to survive into the american society. Indeed, trickster tales, jazz music, the signifying technique of speech are elements that are present throughout Ellison’s novel and these underlines the situation African-Americans within a society dominated by white people after World War II. African-American people find important having an identity within this society. The novel begins with the sentence: “I am an invisible man” (3), one can suggest that at that point, being African-American is nothing but only imaginative interpretation in the eyes of the american white- dominant society because they don’t pay attention to other culture than theirs. That way, throughout the story of the narrator, Ellison’s share the complexity of being black in America, culturally and socially, opposing the general though on black people portrayed through Arthur Schomburg’s description: “The Negro has been a man without a history because he has been considered a man without a worthy culture.” (672)

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