390 Ellison, Ralph
However, each of these novel techniques has a
basis in the canon. For example, Walt Whitman
used long nonrhyming lines, and William Blake cre-
ated his own mythology, which he used in allusory
fashion in his poetry. Eliot draws on the work of
older poets in his work: Homer, William Shake-
speare, and Charles Baudelaire. Further, he incorpo-
rates popular song material in the form of Richard
Wagner’s treatment of the Tristan and Isolde story.
By means of the allusions, Eliot reminds the reader
of the tradition he is breaking and reshaping.
In addition to Wagner, Eliot incorporates many
other traditional sources throughout the poem. His
use of the Grail story in part 5, “What the Thunder
Said,” evokes the legend of King Arthur. In World
War I, the British had depicted themselves as noble
warriors going to save a corrupted continent from
itself, but they had not proven to be as noble as
they wished. As the war drew on, the British were
engaged in deadly trench warfare that destroyed
the countryside of the people they were “saving.”
Heroes usually came home dead or disabled, and
the trenches killed the land. The use of the Fisher
King, the wounded lord of a dying land who can
only be healed by the Grail, captures this state of
affairs nicely. The British after the war are wounded
in spirit if not in body (see the discussion between
the two women at the end of “A Game of Chess”).
The Grail was not found—cannot be found—and so
society is locked in the self-perpetuating prison of its
own shattered past. This use of legendary material
is not the only one in the poem. Eliot also uses the
real figures of Elizabethan politics to demonstrate
London’s current poverty (in “Fire Sermon”). All of
these references, just as with the poetic and musical
references, serve to demonstrate the fragmentation of
society after the war and the breakdown of tradition.
This fragmentation also supports the themes
of alienation and futility in the poem. The use of
allusions reminds the reader of “old times” which
are now gone forever due to World War I. The non-
traditional presentation demonstrates the ruptured
state of society and the need to create new patterns
from the chaos of the Great War. Eliot’s poem cre-
ates a novel approach to poetry through the destruc-
tion and reshaping of the poetic tradition.
Jeremy Brown
ELLISON, RALPH Invisible Man
(1952)
In 1953, Ralph Ellison (1914–94) was awarded the
National Book Award for Invisible Man, his only
novel published during his lifetime. (Juneteenth was
published in 1999) Invisible Man uses first-person
narration to present the experiences and reflections
of the unnamed black protagonist. Set in the 1950s,
it begins in the narrator’s current home underground
and moves backward to his childhood in the rural
South and his years at a black state college. Expelled
from the school, his dream of becoming an educa-
tor is shattered, and the narrator moves north, to
Harlem. Here he works for Liberty Paints before
joining the Brotherhood, a communist-styled group
that works for equality. Continuously engaged in
a process of self-discovery, he struggles to find an
identity for himself outside the expectations and
desires of powerful and hierarchical social structures.
As he journeys from south to north, the Invis-
ible Man interacts with a number of significant
characters, including Mr. Norton, a white trustee of
the college; Mr. Bledsoe, the college’s black presi-
dent; Jim Trueblood, a black sharecropper who has
fathered children by his wife and daughter; Mary, a
Harlem woman who rents rooms to those down on
their luck; Brother Jack, a leader of the Brotherhood;
Tod Clifton, a fellow Brother; Ras the Exhorter,
the leader of a black nationalist group; Rinehart,
a man whose identities arise completely from the
projections of others; and the narrator’s deceased
grandfather. Through the interactions between these
characters, Ellison explores such themes as race,
violence, the American dream, innocence and
experience, oppression, and memory.
Ideas and music from figures such as Booker T.
Washington, Marcus Garvey, Louis Armstrong, and
Bessie Smith form some of the novel’s historical
references. Invisible Man is a visceral novel attuned
to the complex histories of the African-American
freedom movements.
Megan Kusteridentity in Invisible Man
The narrator’s search for identity is one of the most
important themes in Invisible Man. In the novel,
identity is connected to the narrator’s self-percep-