On The Hero’s Identity In Invisible Man From The Perspective Of Cirtical Discourse Analysis

Invisible Man, a classic in modern American literature, has been regarded as the mostimportant work of Ralph Waldo Ellison. In this novel, the writer tells us a black youth’s growthin American society. The whole novel focuses on the process of the hero’s becoming an invisibleman without identity and finally his realization of his identity. In the novel, the writer describesthe blacks’ living difficulty, the sadness of losing their identity and the painstaking efforts ofquesting their identity. This novel expounds how the blacks establish their identity in the whitesociety and reconstruct their real identity after their dream disillusioned.The most important theoretical foundation and the key method of Critical DiscourseAnalysis come from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, in which its purpose is to revealthe hidden meaning of ideology in the discourse. Halliday summarized three functions oflanguage: ideational function, interpersonal function and textual function. Ideational function isused to express the speaker’s experience of the real world, including the inner world of his/herown consciousness and the logical relations among things. It is realized by transitivity.Interpersonal function is the language function that is used to establish, maintain and identify theinter-personal relationship in the society, and it is realized by mood and modality. Textualfunction means the relationship between language itself and the situation of the user, which canbe realized by theme-rheme. In Fowler’s opinion, the ideological meaning hidden in lexicalclassification, transitivity, modality, transformation, systematization and consistency should beparticularly paid attention to when analyzing the discourse under the approach of CDA.Most of the previous studies of the novel Invisible Man focus on its literary language. Withrespect to CDA, it aims to discover the ideology hidden in the mass media discourse. CDA hasbeen seldom used to analyze literary discourse. Therefore, the author takes the Critical DiscourseAnalysis as the approach, and the theory of systemic functional grammar as the framework toanalyze the language in the novel Invisible Man, focusing on the hero’s identity, by employinglexical classification, transitivity, modality and transformation. The author chooses somechapters as the data. With Wordsmith Tools, the “research” function of Word2003and manualcheck, we calculate the frequency of words, six process types of transitivity, modality expressionand transformation in the novel. Based on the calculation, we attempt to analyze the relationshipsbetween the language and the hero’s identity and reveal the ideology of the American society inthe1950s and explore whether the change of the language can cause the change of the hero’sidentity. We find that the use of language can reveal the hero’s identity, the changing of theidentity, and it can also reflect the ideology at that time. Besides, SFG can be used to analyze the language in literary works.There are five chapters. Chapter one is an introduction of the thesis, which introduces thebackground, the writer and the novel, purpose, significance, methodology and data collection,and thesis structure. The second chapter is literature review. This chapter focuses on previousresearches of the novel, the theory of CDA and the theory of identity from different aspects andgives the main focus and innovative points. Chapter three is the theoretical base of the study. Inthis chapter, the author introduces SFG and its structure and working model. The analyticalframework is also introduced, including lexical classification, transitivity, modality, andtransformation. Chapter four is the main part of the thesis. The author analyzes the hero’sidentity and ideology through the language in some choosing paragraphs in the novel. Chapterfive is the conclusion, summarizing the major findings, implications and limitations of the studyand suggestions for further studies.