Double-Consciousness and Liminality in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: When African-Americans are Doomed to Live on the Borders

Abstract

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is an artistic feat that testifies to the abiding presence of double-consciousness in African-American narratives. However, double-consciousness acquires with Ellison a more complicated dimension due, in large part, to his attempt to review the concept so as to reflect exactly the meaning intended by Du Bois. But while it is true that Ellison treats this concept in an ambivalent way that conjures up Du Bois' use in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), his dramatization of the concept reveals its inherent complexity in an unprecedented way. The present study purports to identify the different aspects of the novel that reflect double-consciousness and to show how double-consciousness is an accompanying trait of the novel in every part of it. The study will, also, indicate that Ellison's peculiar way of handling the concept in the process of its dramatization is never a mere replica of the treatment of his predecessors. In fact, Ellison's special dramatization of the concept discloses the novelist's deep and relevant understanding of it.