Character rewritten : the treatment of black identity from Richard Wright's “The man who lived underground” to Ralph Ellison's “Invisible man”

Abstract

While Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison are renowned for their mastery in Afro-American fiction, no work has ever been published to explain the link between Wright‘s "The Man Who Lived Underground" and Ellison‘s "Invisible Man" despite the critics‘ claim that Ellison‘s novel is Wright‘s novella rewritten. This dissertation will seek to fill that gap. In the first chapter, the theme of existentialism, invisibility and identity in Wright will be explored. It will be argued that even if a commentary on race in the novella‘s subtext does not exist, the two works can still be compared because Ellison takes Wright‘s themes and adapts them to the struggle of the African living in America. Thus, in the subsequent section on Ellison, the different ways in which this is done will be explored through a discussion on identity in "Invisible Man" categorised under three main facets: the identity that is imposed on the narrator, his trajectory as a hero and his representation of all African-Americans and the American South. This leads to the conclusion that Ellison adapts the existential philosophy that is present in Wright to his novel in order to illustrate the African-American struggle.