Ralph Ellison

The setting of this story is actually a small town's main square, "right in front of the court house," in the middle of the night, just as the "old clock in the tower was striking twelve." The...

The lines quoted are from the epilogue of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The title character is trying to sort out the meaning of his experience of invisibility and of “hibernation,” when he cut...

This story by Ralph Ellison is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator, who recounts experiences he had as a northern boy visiting relatives in the south. The other main character is his...

The conflict in Ralph Ellison's "A Party Does at the Square" takes the form of the boy character's internal feelings about witnessing the burning of a black man. The narrator (the boy) frames the...

“A Party Down at the Square” took place in the south in the middle of the twentieth century. Ralph Ellison described a scene in a small town that happened too frequently in the south. The...

The work to which I think you're referring is not an essay, but a short story told from the point of view of a white man watching the lynching and public burning of a black man in a public town...

Having discovered that he is invisible to the white world after repeated attempts to have his own reality acknowledged, Ellison's narrator retreats beneath the streets of New York. There he notes...

Point of view is the chief literary element Ellison uses to build empathy. It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of point of view in a story. Whoever's eyes we see the story through...

Ellison's overriding opinion about the South, or any region, relates to identities and is that our identities are not a result of "geography," meaning not the result of pressures from our...

While we can't know if Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man perfectly encapsulates the author's views, his assessment of the South in this novel appears extensively bleak. His deeply critical depiction of...