Reflective Chaos: The Significance of Mirror Images in Ellison’s Invisible Man
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This paper aims to expound the thematic, structural, and narratological significances of mirror images in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Suggested by the recurrent mirror metaphors in the narrative is a world in which heterogeneous and often contrasting elements mirror one another within and across boundaries, invalidating the rationality of epistemological categorization evinced in the protagonist’s quest for self-construction. Indeed, the protagonist’s experience throughout the narrative can be characterized by repeated variations on a theme of castration. Such repeated frustrations entrap the invisible man in the structure of mise en abyme and debunks the supposed progression in the narrative proper, a problem further brought into recognition by the political structure of modern America that keeps its black population ‘running in the loop.’ It is after his literal plunge into the subterranean abyss that the invisible man through his self-reflection comes to terms with the reflective chaos of his identity and the reality. As a narrator, he elicits a creative possibility from his experience of this reflective chaos to construct his own discursive mirror on which are reflected the images of multiplicitous entities that compose America. Thus does the narrator transform what has previously imprisoned him into a modus operandi for liberating the consciousness not only himself, but also his race, the social minorities, and the nation transposed onto his reflective and reflecting narrative.
Abstract
This paper aims to expound the thematic, structural, and narratological significances of mirror images in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Suggested by the recurrent mirror metaphors in the narrative is a world in which heterogeneous and often contrasting elements mirror one another within and across boundaries, invalidating the rationality of epistemological categorization evinced in the protagonist’s quest for self-construction. Indeed, the protagonist’s experience throughout the narrative can be characterized by repeated variations on a theme of castration. Such repeated frustrations entrap the invisible man in the structure of mise en abyme and debunks the supposed progression in the narrative proper, a problem further brought into recognition by the political structure of modern America that keeps its black population ‘running in the loop.’ It is after his literal plunge into the subterranean abyss that the invisible man through his self-reflection comes to terms with the reflective chaos of his identity and the reality. As a narrator, he elicits a creative possibility from his experience of this reflective chaos to construct his own discursive mirror on which are reflected the images of multiplicitous entities that compose America. Thus does the narrator transform what has previously imprisoned him into a modus operandi for liberating the consciousness not only himself, but also his race, the social minorities, and the nation transposed onto his reflective and reflecting narrative.
참고문헌 (19)
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