Race and Identity in Ellison's Research Proposal

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The concept of
miscegenation is explored as an avenue which is suppressed in order to
sustain passability in white culture. The Hardin article denotes that this
invisibility, essentially, "is about passing as white, and the resultant
challenge to stable notions of race; however, at the subtextual level, this
notion also seems to be about passing as heterosexual." (Hardin, 103) In
this work, we can find a connection between the narrator's dedication to a
constantly shifting identity and his desire to obscure either a racial or a
sexual identity of any type of impact on those around him.
Ellison levies a pointed criticism at a racially exclusionary society
while simultaneously recognizing the willful decisions on the part of the
protagonist to adopt this disposition. The author illustrates that the
invisibility which he describes is not necessarily always derived from
within the subject. One sentiment on the novel points to an elected
invisibility, employed to defend one's self against the world's prejudices.
For Ellison, it is instead an invisibility which comes from outside of
himself. Hardin recounts that "the reason he is invisible is that 'people
refuse to see me. . . they see only my surroundings, themselves, or
figments of their imagination-indeed, everything and anything except me.'"
(Hardin, 107)
Ultimately, this becomes an instrument which the narrator is able to
use to his advantage.

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When he dons the character of Rinehart, we find that
the character's absence of form to those around him has allowed him to
fully reinvent himself to the end of meeting purposes and ambitions not
accessible to the self which he knew. The ability to literally adopt a
false or new identity at this juncture in the story would demonstrate the
true impact of his invisibility on the psyche though. Here, we find that
the man has been able to forge no relationships, affiliations or
responsibilities which might obstruct the creation of a new person through
his own identity. In many regards, while this demonstrates the man's
flexibility, it also shows him to be a somewhat lost figure, capable of
manifesting in any form and to the notice of nobody. This freedom-an
important distinction in the life of an American black man-is nonetheless
underscored by a core loneliness to be observed in such a figure.
Though Ellison's work points to the same social sickness at work in
the other literary examples from African American, his story suggests less
the narrator's complicity in this condition so much as his incapacity to
resist it. At center, however, is the author's vain efforts at defining
himself according to the often impossible fit of society's expectations
with his own identity.

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