Invisible Man Rhetorical Analysis

“I am invisible, understand because people refuse to see me” (Ellison 3). An untouchable protagonist finds himself stuck in the shadows of the ever looming times of Jim Crow in Ralph Ellison’s book Invisible Man (1952). He does so through a sense of philosophically concise rhetoric. He acknowledges his invisibility as a byproduct of other’s choices and not his outward appearance nor his place within the futile caste system distraught by the Great Migration. Throughout Invisible Man, the nameless protagonist returns to this topic of invisibility through stories and angles of other characters, searching for his own unique identity which the reader may never fully comprehend. Rhetorical devices identified through the analysis of Invisible Man (1952) can arguably form an alarum, which conveys and foreshadows the illusive concept of Black …show more content…
Early in the nameless protagonist’s life, he drove a town car while in college. One day, he was driving a white founder of his school by the name of Mr. Norton. Within the duration of the ride, the somewhat prolific founder talked about how the African-American people would one day shape America and this man's fate. He even went as far as to say, “ I had a feeling that your people were somehow connected with my destiny. That what happened to you was connected with what would happen to me…” (41) In this, he foreshadows a shift of power (From the White populace of America to the African-American people) which later proves to be true. But in this he finds despair and the nameless protagonist is dumbfounded: How could the untouchables of an established caste system one day lead and shape the future? What could this mean for his identity and how will he later define it?
Throughout Invisible Man, “ [...] I (the nameless protagonist) possessed the only identity I had ever known, and I was losing it.” The nameless protagonist suffers from this idea of identity as a constant image