Ralph Ellison Double Consciousness

In the article Strivings of the Negro People, published in 1897 by W.E.B. Du Bois, famously coined an idea that would later on be the basis for many in the Civil Rights Movement. This idea, double consciousness, was the daily struggle of African Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries. [By] double consciousness, Du Bois referred most importantly to an internal conflict in the African American individual between what was "African" and what was "American" (Mocombe). In this sense, the spiritual nature (African) and the materialistic commercial world (American) that was the double consciousness of black folk . . . were viewed as two distinctive oppositions; personalities (African and American) within a single body (Mocombe). Ralph Ellison later …show more content…
He tells Mr. Norton and the narrator that he is in the asylum because he has “forgotten what he should have never forgotten” (Ellison 90). He then goes on to speak to Norton as if he was a white man himself, which astounds the narrator. This was the narrator’s first look at the effects of refusing to accept the theory of double consciousness. The second character was Brother Clifton, who taught the narrator that by “stepping outside of history”, he could finally become free. However, this freedom brought on invisibility. Once Clifton finally denied the theory of double consciousness, he literally disappeared, which Ellison used to bring imagery into the metaphor. One character that really stuck out as being in the middle of the theory was Rinehart. The narrator learned of him when he was repeatedly mistaken for Rinehart while walking down the street. Rinehart was a man who accepted being both African and American, and denied the theory, depending on the situation he was in. He was one who could control everybody while still being invisible as a whole. Rinehart fascinated the narrator by his ability to change his personality and was a large influence over the narrator’s future …show more content…
When someone rejects the idea of double consciousness, they are, ironically, seen as ‘invisible’. The narrator came across a few people who were invisible, but could be seen by him because he was becoming invisible himself. The three men he saw on the subway are an example of this invisibility because as he describes them, “Everyone must have seen them, or heard their muted laughter, or smelled the heavy pomade on their hair— or perhaps failed to see them at all. For they were men outside of historical time, they were untouched” (Ellison 440). They had fallen outside of time, like Clifton said, so no one else on the train noticed them, even though they should have been very