Ralph Ellison and the African American Experience: Creating Identity, Social Inequality, and Race

This research paper will examine the critical and analytical essays written by African American author Ralph Waldo Emerson and his novel Invisible Man. I will draw out Ellison’s thoughts and philosophies on topics such as social equality and inequality, the African American experience during the twentieth century, and other literary tropes and archetypes that are specific to the African American experience such as the creation of identity. The essays I will be using are “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”, “The World and the Jug”, and “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity”. All three essays touch upon notions of identity, racial injustices, and the natural African American experience versus the white projection of the African American experience. Ellison writes of a narrator growing up and developing a sense of self while creating his identity. I will analyze the selected essays and attempt to establish the important themes and thoughts that Ellison is touching upon, such as identity, racial injustices, and the African American experience, and move to Invisible Man to show his thought processes in action. The goal is to examine the importance of the links that are present between Ellison’s critical work and his prose