earticle

영어

The multifaceted symbolism adopted by Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man is considered as an attempt to understand the painful reality of the African-Americans by giving order and form to the chaos of their experience. Working as an effective means to express the tragically ironic implications of their chaotic experience, his symbolism includes diverse ways of expression such as symbolic objects, symbolic acts, and symbolic incidents and episodes. Among those various descriptive techniques, Ellison's use of symbolic objects is of primary importance in Invisible Man, in that they are heavily charged with the protagonist's recognition of the social reality that American blacks face. This paper explores the unique way in which the symbolic objects function as substantial signifiers in the novel. Some of the symbolic objects absorb the historical accumulation of the African-Americans' painful experience, whose will was severely pulled this way and that because of their “double consciousness.” The other symbolic objects become signifiers to which the protagonist projects his personal desire for social climb. Yet in both cases, they cause him “discomfort far beyond their intrinsic meaning as objects.” The protagonist undergoes inner conflict caused by two disparate psychological impetuses: his will to successfully assimilate into American society and his innermost impulse for racial awareness. The meaning that he projects to the symbolic objects becomes also sharply contradictory because it is based upon his double consciousness. Ironically, however, Ellison incarnates the physical experience of the ‘invisible man' by using visible and tangible symbolic objects. Thanks to such an ironic feature of his symbolism, the meaning of the African-Americans' experience can accommodate its universality and uniqueness at once without being thinned out into abstractness and ambiguity.