A Personal Resistance: The African American experience of the self and society as narrated in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.

Abstract

My final dissertation puts into dialogue two novels, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, focusing on their way of addressing the topics of self-identity and relationship with society in the African American experience. The first chapter provides the historical context in which the two novels have been written, the 1950s and 1960s, exploring those years’ racial turmoil and specifically the birth of the civil rights’ movement. Furthermore, it provides an introduction to Du Bois’ concept of Double Consciousness, essential to understand the following analysis. Chapter two is devoted to Invisible Man. Beginning with an introduction to the Ellison’s life and works, the discourse proceeds to analyse the relationship between the novel and the Bildungsroman, expanding on the academic debate on the possibility to juxtapose the genre to the African American experience. Moreover, it analyses the topics of invisibility and disillusionment as represented in the novel. Chapter three is on Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. After an introduction to the author’s life and works, it gives a close reading of the book, divided in two parts. The first part focuses on the portraying of the African American condition per se, whereas the second part shows how, in Baldwin’s analysis of his contemporary reality, the African American presence is a revelatory and disruptive element for the American society at large. Chapter four brings together the thought of the two authors in examining their hopes, as expressed in the two works, concerning the condition of African Americans in the future. The title, “A Personal Resistance”, refers to Invisible Man’s journey in the novel: at the end of the vicissitudes he narrates, the protagonist decides to shed all the identities people have given in him, to proclaim himself, indeed, as Invisible. It also refers to the exhortation Baldwin addresses to his nephew in The Fire Next Time. The resistance, in this case, is intended as against the negative narration the American society made of him as a Black person.