Style of Ellison's Writing and How it Relates to Invisible Man
Throughout Invisible Man, Ellison employs a constantly changing, improvisational style which is directly based on his experiences in jazz performance. Invisible Man rangwes from being very tragic to being almost a vicious lampoon of some topics. It also ranges from realism to extreme surrealism. Also, like many non-lyrical jazz music of the time, Invisible Man is incredibly rich in symbolism and metaphor. Ellison displays his true virtuosity on the subject with his ue of multiple styles and tones. Ellison brings the reader deeply into the black experience in America and the human struggle for individuality that was going on in America at the time, and which is directly paralleled in Invisible Man by the constant struggle the narrator goes through with all the people and things around him.
Because of the narrator's inherent innocense regarding race relations and "invisibility" in America, Ellison forces the reader to peer past the narrator's biased interpretation of events so that the reader can uncover Ellison's actual intentions in writing about certain events. Ellison uses extreme irony to allow the reader to catch the things that the narrator misses. Take the battle royal in the first chapter for example. The narrator passes absolutely no judgement on the behavior of the white men, he justs accepts it for how it is. While the narrator can be somewhat unreliable because of his blindness, Ellison makes absolutely sure that the reader perceives the narrator's blindness.
Ellison also employs schism as a technique in writing Invisible Man. There is a clear divison that exists between Ellison and the narrator, and there is also a clear division that arises between the narrator as the narrator of the novel, and the narrator as a character in the story. Ellison employs the tactic of making the reader see both how the narrator looks back on the experiences he had as a wise man, changed by the hardships of life, and also as a young, naive man, experienced those hardships just mentioned first hand.
Although the fact that the narrator is an African American man in the 30s is very clear reason as to why his life is hard, Ellison does repeatedly emphasize his intent to display the narrator as a universal character, a general man who encounters hardships on the path to defining himself against social expectations.
