Visible Black Culture In Invisible Man

Invisible Man, which took Ralph Ellison seven years' hard efforts, was published in 1952. Since its publication, it has been announced one of the most important and influential Afro-American novel and won numerous awards. The reason for this novel's success should go back through its theme and social context. In this novel, Ellison places the racial problem in the multicultural society and mainly aims to search for the question "who am I". According to invisible man's experience, in America, a multicultural society, it is a much more serious problem for a black people to define himself and search for the existence of human being than direct racial discrimination. So Ellison concerns the identity quest of Afro-American as a human being more than a black people. However, in view of the black people's unique history together with the social reality in America, this identity quest is totally in accordance with black culture. Therefore, to express the theme of identity quest better, Ralph Ellison borrows various elements from black culture and mixes them in the novel.In black aesthetics, relating the Afro-American text to black culture is one of the points of views presented by Houston A. Baker, Jr. In his blues vernacular theory, he offers a basis for studying the relationship between Afro-American literature and culture. He puts the text in the black tradition and society, endows the text with a context and tries to find various possibilities to read the text.This dissertation, based on the black aesthetics of Houston Baker, is going to study Invisible Man on the theme of identity quest in five chapters. The first chapter starts from an introduction to Ralph Ellison and his work Invisible Man with the basis of black aesthetics. The last chapter gives a summary of invisible man's striving for his black cultural identity and concludes basis point of view in this dissertation. The second, third, and fourth chapters are the main body of this dissertation.The second chapter focuses on the folklore in Invisible Man. As the portrayal of the essential spirit of black culture, Afro-American folklore is the deep root of Ellison's work. The analysis is divided into two parts. The first part examines the animal tale: Jack the Rabbit, Jack the Bear, and the dog. The second part discusses the running metaphor which symbolizes the road to freedom.The third part traces sermon and its influence in the novel. As the Bible language in black society, African American sermon combines the oral tradition and religion of white, and becomes a way of expression in this novel. This dissertation is going to discuss the sermons in three parts: "The Blackness of Blackness" given by storefront preacher in prologue and epilogue; Barbee's speech at the college; protagonist as preacher.The fourth part mainly presents the black musical elements in two aspects. The first part gives an analysis on jazz and the theme of identity quest and the techniques of jazz music. As a former jazz player, Ellison employs a lot of techniques of jazz to develop the theme: improvisation, riffings, and polyrhythm. The second part concentrates on the influence of blues through three typical examples: Louis Armstrong, Trueblood, and Mary Rambo. Black music, either jazz or blues, is the most important black cultural element in the novel.