English Rowan TH

    In Invisible Man  Ralph Ellison is not trying to tell the story of just one man. However, taking on the project of representing everyone's experience with racism is a huge and probably impossible task. Because of how hard this would be, one of the tactics that Ellison heavily relies on throughout Invisible Man  is metaphor. These metaphors range from extremely on-the-nose to much more subtle, and they create a sort of almost ethereal, absurdist tone to the book as a whole. The things that the narrator goes through in this book are very extreme and often illogical or confusing. I would guess that all of this absurdity will shape the character into the manic person that he is in the prologue with his room with lightbulbs wired to every surface. I would argue that the choice to have the narrator set the tone this way at all is a strong commitment to absurdism from the get-go.      But more than just setting the tone, these metaphors also act as commentary on larger racial dynamics

     In "How Bigger Was Born" Richard Wright talks very explicitly about how he views Native Son 's Bigger Thomas as a composite of many people that he has known and observed over the course of his life. He discusses at length their various qualities and the ways that he thinks they all exemplify what he was trying to communicate through Bigger in Native Son.  For me, this supplement was definitely the most clarifying part of the book in reference to Bigger's character, and it was really interesting to read that after reading and discussing the book.       Reading Wright's description of who this character is and what his existence means is a very different experience from reading the book itself. Bigger means something much more expansive and far-reaching to Wright personally than just the character in this book. He is the culmination of many years of observation of the behavior of huge numbers of people, almost a theory of human nature in some ways. Wright says,

 Everything after this post is for African-American Literature.