Ralph Ellison and Ralph Ellison and Invisible Invisible Man Man (1952)(1952)

ThemeTheme Dantesque journey from the South to the North Quoted from 《美国文学研究评论选下册》， p34

6:

The nameless hero is to move from invisibility to vision. Throughout the dangers, corruptions, and temptations awaiting for him, he repeats the history of his own race, conducting a ceaseless ”psychological scrimmage” with everyone, himself included. Exploited by all----

White Communists and African nationalists, Southern bigots and northern liberals, women and men alike, he proceeds, from innocence to disillusionment to the edge of a new wisdom, a dialectic sense of himself. In the surreal cool cellar lit by 1369 light bulbs when he ends, he perceives the essential

chaos of the mind, and finds freedom in a form that can “condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, say yes and say no.”

StyleStyle

“In the South, where he (the protagonist) was trying to fit into a traditional pattern and where his sense of certainty had not yet been challenged, I felt a more naturalistic treatment was adequate. . . . Ad the hero passes from the South to the North, from the relatively stable to the swiftly changing, his sense of certainty is lost and the style becomes expressionistic.

Later on during his fall from grace in the Brotherhood it becomes somewhat surrealistic. The styles try to express both his state of consciousness and the state of society.” (The American Novel, New York, 1972, pp.507-508)

TermsTerms Naturalism: naturalism, in literature, an approach th

at proceeds from an analysis of reality in terms of natural forces, e.g., heredity, environment, physical drives. The chief literary theorist on naturalism was Émile Zola, who said in his essay Le Roman expérimental (1880) that the novelist should be like the scientist, examining dispassionately various phenomena in life and drawing indisputable conclusions. The naturalists tended to concern themselves with the harsh, often sordid, aspects of life.

SurrealismSurrealism literary and art movement influenced by Freudianism and

dedicated to the expression of imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason and free of convention. The movement was founded (1924) in Paris by André Breton, Surrealist writers were interested in the associations and implications of words rather than their literal meanings; their works are thus extraordinarily difficult to read. In art the movement became dominant in the 1920s and 30s and was internationally practiced with many and varied forms of expression. The movement survived but was greatly diminished after World War II.

Literary surrealism concentrates on describing the subconscious mind, permitting itself to develop nonlogically in order to reveal the operation of the subconscious, which, according to Freud, is instinctive and nonlogically organized in its associations.

Expressionism Expressionism In literature, expressionism is often considered a revolt against realism an

d naturalism, seeking to achieve a psychological or spiritual reality rather than record external events in logical sequence. In the novel, the term is closely allied to the writing of Franz Kafka and James Joyce (see stream of consciousness). In the drama, Strindberg is considered the forefather of the expressionists, though the term is specifically applied to a group of early 20th-century German dramatists, including Kaiser, Toller, and Wedekind. Their work was often characterized by a bizarre distortion of reality. Playwrights not closely associated with the expressionists occasionally wrote expressionist drama, e.g., Karel Čapek's R.U.R. (1921) and Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones (1921). The movement, though short-lived, gave impetus to a free form of writing and of production in modern theater.