Book contents
- The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction
- The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Fables of Autonomy in Late James
- Chapter 2 “She Will Drown Me with Her”
- Chapter 3 “Innumerable Slight Changes”
- Chapter 4 “I Was Always Sentimental”
- Chapter 5 “He Forgot His History”
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
Chapter 5 - “He Forgot His History”
Ellison’s Naturalist Modernism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 November 2022
- The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction
- The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Fables of Autonomy in Late James
- Chapter 2 “She Will Drown Me with Her”
- Chapter 3 “Innumerable Slight Changes”
- Chapter 4 “I Was Always Sentimental”
- Chapter 5 “He Forgot His History”
- Conclusion
- References
- Index
Summary
In Chapter 5, I turn to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Long understood in opposition to Richard Wright’s naturalism, Ellison’s work nevertheless retains its sense of social determination. Equal parts bildungsroman and picaresque, Invisible Man seems to undo every stable category it creates. Dominated by an idea of surplus that is both aesthetic and economic, the hallucinatory logic of Invisible Man represents a book-length dissection of our culture’s naturalization of race. In doing so, it reveals itself to be profoundly ambivalent about the protagonist’s search for his true self, which becomes, in this reading, a mark of his subjection to America’s racial imaginary. Like Beckett, then, Ellison presents a world with little hope, but his protest against catastrophe contains the negative image of a freedom currently impossible to attain.
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- The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction , pp. 169 - 201Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022