While the civil war ended one form of slavery in America, another system of oppression was ready to take its place. In Ralph Ellison’s acclaimed novel Invisible Man, a young black, nameless narrator struggles through a series of hard-won lessons as he makes his journey from the Deep South to Harlem, New York, from naiveté to disenchantment, from illusion to insight. Like most of us, he stumbles down the path of identity, adopting several …showed first 75 words of 1229 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1229 total…himself, but that which others thought him to be. And, like Booker T. Washington, he accommodated them. He falls asleep and dreams that he is confronted with all his antagonists, all those that befriended him and then betrayed him, and he is able to tell them that he is through running. They castrate him and he is free of all illusion, ready for a new life. Bibliography Ellison, Ralph. The Invisible man, New York: Doubleday. 1967