Invisible Man Essay: Search for True Identity :: Invisible Man Essays

seek for True Identity in Invisible Man Who the hell am I? (Ellison 386) This question puzzled the invisible man, the unidentified, anonymous teller of Ralph Ellisons acclaimed unexampled Invisible Man. Throughout the story, the fibber embarks on a mental and sensible journey to seek what the narrator believes is true identity, a belief kinda mistaken, for he, although unaware of it, had already been inhabiting true identities all along. The narrators life is filled with incessant eruptions of mental traumas. The biggest psychological burden he has is his identity, or rather his misidentity. He feels wearing on the nerves (Ellison 3) for people to see him as what they akin to believe he is and not see him as what he actually is. Throughout his life, he takes on several different identities and none, he echos, adequately represents his true self, until his final one, as an invisible man. The narrator thinks the many identities he possesses does not reflect himself, but he fails to recognize that identity is hardly a mirror that reflects the surrounding and the soulfulness who looks into it. It is only in this face of the immediate surrounding can the viewers relate the narrators identity to. The viewers see only the part of the narrator that is apparently connected to the viewers receive world. The part obscured is unknown and therefore insignificant. Lucius Brockway, an old operator of the paint factory, apothegm the narrator only as an existence threatening his job, despite that the narrator is sent there to merely assist him. Brockway repeatedly question the narrator of his purpose there and his mechanical credentials but never veritable(a) bother to inquire his name. Because to the old fellow, who the narrator is as a person is uninterested. What he is as an object, and what that objects kind is to Lucius Brockways engine room is important. The narrators identity is derived from this relationship, and this relationship suggests to Broc kway that his identity is a threat. However the viewer decides to see mortal is the identity they assign to that person. The Closing of The American Mind, by Allan Bloom, explains this identity phenomenon by comparing two ships of states (Bloom 113). If one ship is to be forever at sea, and K another is to reach port and the passengers go their separate ways, they think about one another and their relationships on the ship very otherwise in the two cases (Bloom 113).