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Double-Consciousness and Liminality in Ralph
Ellison’s Invisible Man: When African-
Americans are Doomed to Live on the Borders
Mohammed RITCHANE
Phd. Ibn Zohr University, Agadir - Morocco
So I denounce and I defend, and I love and I hate.
Ralph Ellison
Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it
contradict everything you said today
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is an art istic feat
that testifies to the abiding presence of double-
consciousness in African-American narrat ives. However,
double-consciousness acquires with Ellison a more
complicated dimension due, in large part, to his attempt to
review the concept so as to reflect exactly the mean ing
intended by Du Bois. But while it is true that Ellison
treats this concept in an ambivalent way that conjures up
Du Bo is' use in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), h is
dramat ization of the concept reveals its inherent
comple xity in an unprecedented way. The present study
purports to identify the different aspects of the novel that
reflect double-consciousness and to show how double-
consciousness is an accompanying trait of the novel in
every part of it. The study will, also, indicate that
Ellison's peculiar way of handling the concept in the
process of its dramatizat ion is never a mere replica of the
treatment of his predecessors. In fact, Ellison's special
dramat ization of the concept discloses the novelist's deep
and relevant understanding of it.
Invisible Man offers a rich piece of art in which
double-consciousness is dramat ized in an unprecedented
way. In fact, the novel can be considered as an attempt at
rethinking the concept of double-consciousness
altogether. What seems original about Invisible Man in its
connection with this concept is that its author has for the
first time dramatized the concept, as will be shown, in a
way that has provided a resolution for the tension of the
African-A merican's ‘warring souls’. And if there is a
work of art that has best reflected as faithfully as possible
Du Bois' concept of double-consciousness, it is
unarguably Invisible Man.
The novel, wh ich resists summation, relates in the
first person point of view the story of an educated young
black boy and his journey from the South to the North of
America during the pre-Civil Rights era when Blacks
were denied equal treat ment of Whites. Because of
racis m, the unnamed narrator claims that he is invisible
since others refuse to see him. Consequently, he chooses
to live underground to ponder over his condition. This
decision comes after many series of d isillusionments
caused by abortive attempts to integrate within an
environment wh ich refuses to recognize his indiv iduality.
A misconception of his grandfather's advice costs the
narrator many hardships; unable to perceive the
grandfather's saying's far-reaching irony, the narrator acts
in the wrong way. On his deathbed, the grandfather's last
words addressed to the narrator's father are,
Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the
good fight. I never told you, but our life is a
war and I have been a traitor all my born
days, a spy in the enemy's country ever
since I give up my gun back in the
Reconstruction. Live with your head in the
lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em
with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree
'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller
you till they vomit or bust wide open.1
These words will haunt the narrator in all the stages of his
life because he cannot conceive how his grandfather has
qualified himself as traitor and spy, and how meekness
can be a dangerous deed. The narrator owes h is final
uplift to the correct understanding of this saying. In fact,
the grandfather's saying reveals an apparent contradiction:
how can the narrator keep the good fight and 'yes' the
white man at the same time? This seeming contradiction
should not be surprising since it emanates fro m an
1 - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (U.S.A.: Penguin Book, 1952),
p. 17. Subsequent references to this edition appear in
parentheses in the text under the initials I. M.
International Journal of English Literature and Social Sciences (IJELS) Vol-4, Issue-2, Mar - Apr, 2019
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African-A merican whose life has been conditioned by
doubleness and contradictions to which he has always
been submitted. The grandson's inability to grasp the
mean ing of the saying is attributed to his blindness to his
condition as African-American, and his taking the saying
at face value. Also, the grandfather's qualification of their
lives as a war certainly evokes Du Bois' warring souls.
St ructurally, the novel is composed of a pro logue,
twenty-five chapters and an epilogue; but while the
prologue and the epilogue take place in the present, the
twenty-five chapters are past events that the narrator is
remin iscing about in his hole. His decision to live
underground is built on his past experiences fraught with
frustration and through which he moves fro m innocence
to initiat ion. This journey is a desperate search for identity
that submitted him to d ifferent sorts of humiliat ion and
self-effacement by persons who do not care a fig about his
individuality. Part of the narrator's misfortunes is
attributable to his double-consciousness which endows
him with t wo selves, a successful fusion of them is not
always guaranteed. Throughout the first different stages
of the novel, the narrator has always sacrificed his
individuality to accommodate the others' preferences; his
flaw was that he did not, in his first stages, succeed in
merging successfully his t wo selves, his two warring
souls, to use the language of Du Bois.
Invisible Man is a work of art in which a harmony
between Du Bois' two warring souls is finally achieved,
turning double-consciousness, ultimately, into an asset. If
in Richard Wright's Native Son double-consciousness is
depicted throughout the whole novel as a liab ility that was
the direct cause of Bigger Tho mas's tragedy, Ellison ends
his Invisible Man by allo wing h is protagonist, at the end
of the novel, to resolve the tension between the two
opposing selves of double-consciousness. This double-
consciousness which is at the heart of the novel is
expressed by Ellison through a variety of ways that make
the concept continuously reverberate throughout the
whole novel. One such a remarkable way is liminality.
A salient feature of the novel that underscores
double-consciousness is liminality. In fact, the interest in
liminality has contributed in shedding some light on a
spatiotemporal stage, which has for a long time been
consigned to oblivion. The word liminality, wh ich is
derived fro m the Latin word limen, 'boundary' or
'threshold,' was originally coined by the French folklorist,
Arnold van Gennep who used it in h is work known as
Rites de Passage published in 1909. But it was Victor
Turner, the British anthropologist who later developed the
concept in his book The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of
Ndembu Ritual (1967). W ith this latter, the term acquired
much breadth by its wide application to a variety o f fields
of recent researches. In his analysis of the concept, Turner
distinguishes between three phases of liminality : a
'preliminal,' a 'liminal,' and a 'postliminal' stage, and
argues that the liminal, or central, phase is the most
critical of the three because it denotes a ‘betwixt and
between’ 2 phase. The importance of the liminal phase
emanates from the position of the liminal persona who
has left one state but has not entered a new one yet, an
idea best illustrated by Robert J. Butler's declaration that
“[l]iminality describes that ‘betwixt and between’ phase
of rites of passage when an indiv idual has left one fixed
social status and has not yet been incorporated into
another.”3 This liminality, in the words of Victor Turner,
or boundary maintenance, as Frederic Barth terms it,
invades the whole novel. It is itself a source of
unsteadiness because of its instability. It belongs to two
sides the frontiers of which are so blurred that a clear
distinction between them is as hard as the separation of
the narrator's two hermetically sealed selves.
A close reading of Invisible Man will reveal that the
novel is an interminable series of liminalit ies. These
liminalit ies, which pervade every part of the novel, are
meant to reflect doubleness in general and the narrator's
double-consciousness in part icular. Throughout the whole
novel, the unnamed inchoate narrator is always torn
between two poles. No sooner does he flee one position
than he finds himself involved in a new one. To begin
with, the Invisible Man's story is located between a
prologue and an epilogue that serve as borders to the
novel. In this respect, Berndt Ostendorf considers that
“[t]he novel's Pro logue and Epilogue could be read, both
in form and in content, as essays on liminality and
transition.”4 The prologue takes as point of departure the
hole, and the epilogue returns to the same hole. The
prologue and epilogue provide the novel with two
liminalit ies, a first one at the beginning of the novel
introducing the reader to the novel per se and providing
the reader with information about the narrator, and a
second one dealing with the Invisible Man's prospects of
social reintegration after a period of hibernation. But
though the prologue and epilogue serve, formally, the
purpose of framing the novel, each of the two plays a
radically different, if not opposite, role in the overall
mean ing of the novel. Though the same, the narrator of
the prologue is totally different fro m the one in the
epilogue who has gone through a process of initiation,
hence the importance of these two sections which
2 - Victor W. Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu
Ritual (U. S. A.: Cornell University Press, 1967), p. 93.
3 - Robert J. Butler, The Critical Response to Ralph Ellison
(Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000), p. 81.
4- Berndt Ostendorf, “Ralph Waldo Ellison: Anthropology,
M odernism, and Jazz,” in: New Essays on Invisible Man. Ed.
Robert G. O’M eally (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1988), p. 99.
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contribute to the understanding of the novel whose
message relies heavily on the protagonist's transition,
maturity and growth. In sum, the prologue and epilogue
present the Invisible Man in his final stage, but the former
presents the motives and the causes of the narrator's
hibernation, while the latter hints at an almost final
resolution. It should be underlined that both the action of
the prologue and that of the epilogue occur after the
events of the novel. By sharing the same temporal aspect,
namely the present time, the prologue and the epilogue
may be superimposed; and in being so, they emphasize
simultaneity and doubleness.
At the start of the novel, and as early as the
prologue, the narrator straightforward ly announces that he
lives in a border, liminal area situated between Harlem
and the white mainstay of the city, but belongs to neither.5
He is in a liminal border space which is a peculiar
location, as he himself states in the first few pages of the
novel: "The joke, of course, is that I don't live in Harlem,
but in a border area" (I. M. p. 9).Th is situation denotes his
spatial in-betweeness, being - as he is - situated between
two spheres, but precisely in neither. It is a situation that
allo ws him to be conditioned by the atmospheres of the
two areas, and consequently leads him to a doubleness of
perception, culminating in double-consciousness. Perhaps
the narrator's invisibility is due, in some part, to h is
dwelling in this border area, wh ich escapes control and
justifies his siphoning electricity without being detected.
Significantly, the narrator's final init iation is itself
achieved in the underground, the border area, which
underlines the importance of borders in the life of
African-A mericans. Though analyzing borders in a
different context related to the colonial setting, Ho mi
Bhabha seems to better illustrate the crucial importance of
borders in Ellison's Invisible Man when he says,
These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the
terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood
– singular or co mmunal – that init iate new
signs of identity, and innovative sites of
collaboration, and contestation, in the act of
defining the idea of society itself.6
This is what happens to the narrator in the novel; the new
clear vision of his own existence is achieved through
hibernation in the hole as a liminal space. In the hole, the
Invisible Man has succeeded in defining or, rather,
redefining his self as well as his social status.
5 - This idea echoes Ellison’s essay “Harlem Is Nowhere,”
written in 1948 but remained unpublished till 1964 in which
he describes the instable and contradictory life African-
Americans lead in the city of Harlem.
6 - Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York and
London: Routledge, 1994), pp.1-2.
The ho le is a p lace depicted as calm and
uncontaminated by neither of the two poles that have
never ceased to tear apart the narrator during h is first
stages before his hibernation. Ellison reverses the
conception of the border area as a fixed, static place
characterized by stability, and espouses the idea which
holds that “[a] boundary is not that at which something
stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that
fro m which so mething begins its presencing”7 (Italics in
the text). It is the hibernation in the hole which
illu minates the narrator's path, and allows him to
reintegrate positively within society after having put
under scrutiny all h is past experiences. This hole, this
border area, is seen under a positive light: "warm and full
of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt if there is a brighter
spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not
exclude Broadway" (I.M., p. 9 - Italics in the text). And
"hibernation" itself wh ich takes place only in this border
area, "is a covert preparation fo r a mo re overt action"
(I.M., p. 15). Hence the major importance that borders
acquire with Ellison. In his underground haven, which
plays the role of a sanctuary, the narrator's double-
consciousness has attained new meaning, for he is
situated in an invisib le, placeless place where he has the
opportunity to tune his two selves together so that he
would be able to accomplish his social roles adequately.
The placement of the protagonist in a border area, what
Mary Louise Pratt calls "the contact zone," is meant to
emphasize h is duality, and consequently efface the
frontiers between the two spheres which are at the origin
of the segregationist behavior of the Whites, a condition
which affects, largely, the destiny of the black man
physically as well as psychologically.
Of all the places in the novel the cellar remains the
quintessential symbol denoting the state of liminality. The
narrator's recourse to this boundary area comes from h is
deep conviction that liminality, as a critic puts it,
Collapses the center/margin polarity,
turning the boundary, the in-between space
into a turbulent eddy, threatening to disrupt
the traditional hierarch ical arrangements.
Throughout the novel, while recounting his
experience, the narrator is in liminal space
and time. His state of hibernation is an
amb iguous synthesis of stagnancy and
change.8
However, Ellison has not waited till the end of the novel
to make of his narrator a liminal character; liminality has
7 - M artin Heidegger, ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’, quoted in:
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New
York: Routledge, 1994), p. 1.
8 - Yonka Krasteva, ‘‘Chaos and Pattern in Ellison's Invisible
Man,” The Southern Literary Journal, 30 (1997) , p. 56.
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accompanied the narrator fro m beginning to end. Being
simu ltaneously African and American doomed to live in
frontiers, the Invisible Man and the people of his race
have always occupied liminal positions. His grandfather is
introduced to the reader as being in a liminal state
between life and death. This latter's liminal position is of
high significance since it denotes a phase of transition
between two generations of African-A mericans,
contributing, thus, to the reinforcement of the doubleness
of the narrator who is confronted with a situation
symbolizing the past which is fading but still persistently
haunting him, and a new e ra he is about to confront. Even
if the grandfather is presented only once in the novel on
his deathbed, he keeps on haunting the narrator
permanently during his various displacements. The shade
of the grandfather constitutes only a part of the narrator's
consciousness that is torn between this shade of the past
and the present. The Invisible Man is attempt ing to get rid
of the past symbolized by the death of the grandfather, but
has not yet entered a new safe phase of life, the situation
becoming co mplicated by his grandfather's ambiguous
saying which, at least ostensibly, evokes duplicity: "I
want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em
with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em
swoller you till they vomit o r bust wide open" (I.M. p.
17).
What is peculiar about the narrator, as far as
liminality is concerned, is that when he thinks that he has
left a liminal state, finds himself in front of a new on e
until his fall in the cellar, the final liminality; he is always
torn between two poles. His life is a series of liminalit ies.
Hardly does he leave a condition, a classification or a
state than he confronts another, and this liminal state he
occupies engenders his invisibility. This is what is meant
by Turner when he asserts that the ‘“subject of passage
ritual is, in the liminal period, structurally, if not
physically, ‘invisible.’” 9 After leaving the college, the
narrator becomes socially unclassified, situated between
the hope of returning to the college and his journey to the
North. Though he left the college physically, he remained
obsessed with it, encouraged by the seven letters of
recommendation handed to him by Dr. Bledsoe, the
college president.
The narrator's heading north increases his condition
of double-consciousness, because he has remained in a
state of liminality between the past and the present despite
his departure from the South. His aspiration towards
leadership forces him to attempt to forget his past during
his search for new horizons; but this attempt is baffled by
many reminders of h is past, a past reminding h im of the
impossibility of shedding the past, being as it is, an
9 - Turner, The Forest of Symbols, p. 95
important constituent of his identity. Throughout the
whole novel, the Invisib le Man is presented as torn
between the past and the present in an overlapping
manner, and “the novel constantly provides echoes of past
eras within the narrat ive present.”10 The narrator lives in
the present with reminiscences fro m the past echoed by
his grandfather's voice. Here, there is a temporal
doubleness, a temporal liminality, which is a perennial
characteristic acco mpanying the nameless protagonist,
and contributing to the persistence of his double-
consciousness.
In addition to the suitcase and the letters of
recommendation that still bind him to the college and
keep on situating him between a past and a present
situation; during his journey, the narrator encounters
many reminders that keep him in constant contact with his
past. While getting in the train heading north, he comes
across the vet whom he met earlier in the Go lden Day,
and whose speech is no less ambiguous than that of the
narrator's grandfather. On his arrival to Harlem, and in
spite of the larger scope of freedom, the narrator cannot
get rid of his double-consciousness easily, because still
liv ing in a liminal phase, torn between two opposed poles,
his past evoked by the reminders that conjure up slavery
and racis m and h is present auguring boundless hope. This
buttresses the claim that double-consciousness is not
related only to the South or any other place where racis m
is manifest, but rather to the African-A mericans' historical
heritage that is indelibly inscribed in their psyche.
In the North, the reminders abound; there is first the
meet ing with Peter Wheatstraw who is typically southern
in every respect. It is not coincidental that during this
meet ing, known as the Wheatstraw episode, the cartman
makes use of scriptio continua, in
whichwordswerewrittenwithoutspace. The cart man
asserts,
"I'maseventhsonofaseventhsonbawnwithacauloverbotheye
sandraisedonblackcatboneshighjohntheconquerorandgreas
ygreens -" (I.M. p. 144), a declaration which, structurally,
attempts to efface borders and creates a kind of word
lin kage, reflect ing Wheatstraw's, and by extension the
narrator's strivings to join their t wo selves. Wheatstraw's
declaration, also, refers unequivocally to Du Bois' famous
assertion that
the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with
a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this
American world - a world wh ich yields him
no true self-consciousness, but only lets
him see himself through the revelation of
the other world. (Souls, p. 7)
10 - M arc Singer, ‘“A Slightly Different Sense of Time:’
Palimpsestic Time in Invisible Man.” Twentieth Century
Literature, 49 (2003), p. 390.
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It is to be concluded from the narrator's meeting with the
cartman that the African-A merican's heritage cannot be
erased by a simp le desertion of the area in wh ich this
heritage has burgeoned. Rather, the African-A merican's
past accompanies him permanently, because it is an
essential part of his identity wh ich is inherently double,
composed of two indivisible parts.
The past for the narrator, and for all African -
Americans, acquires its importance fro m its being the
crucible of the crucial events of their history. Coupled
with the present, they both give birth to, o r at least
enhance, double-consciousness. One instance of
emphasizing the importance of preserving the past as an
indispensable constituent of the African-A merican's
identity is the lin k in Tarp's iron leg handed to the narrator
and which stands as a memory fro m the past and its
unspeakable terrors. '"I'd like to pass it on to you There,'
he [Brother Tarp] said, handing it to me. 'Funny thing to
give somebody, but I think it's got a heap of signifying
wrapped up in it and it might help you remember what
we're really fighting against. I don't think of it in terms of
but two words, yes and no; but it signifies a heap
more…" ' (I.M. p. 313 - Italics in the text); the link, as its
name suggests, is a gift intended to emphasize the
importance of the preservation of memo ry and the past,
and to link the past to the present. As for Du Bois,
Douglass, Toni Morrison and other notable African -
Americans, the past - in spite of its unspeakable terrors, or
perhaps because of them - should, in no way, be ignored
or glossed over because it remains an integral part of the
African-A merican's essence. These artists have always
been ready to express themselves through the lens of the
past, an idea corroborated by Fanon who “recognizes the
crucial importance, fo r subordinated peoples, of asserting
their …. cultural trad itions and retrieving their repressed
histories.”11
More than a series of events to ru minate on, the past
for the Invisible Man, especially after his self-discovery,
serves as a road map that guides him and prevents him
fro m repudiating his culture, wh ile remain ing ready to
embrace other views that preach inclusion. Everything
that refers to the past is not a badge of shame, as it is
propagated by the supremacist to blur or erase the other's
identity, and as it is thought by the narrator in h is first
stages; the past is a precious nostalgia that contains
events seldom registered in history. Many characters in
the novel are associated with the past, but Mary Rambo is
recognized by the protagonist as "a stable familiar force
like something out of my past which kept me fro m
whirling off into some unknown which I dared not face"
11 - Bhabha, The Location of Culture, p. 9.
(I.M., p. 258). The past is, in this sense, a modulator that
contributes to the maintenance of the African-A merican's
psychical equilibrium.
In its fusion with the present, the past becomes
among the crucial instigators that generate the peculiar
state Du Bois labels double-consciousness, this peculiar
experience of the African-American which cannot be
objectively perceived except by those who experienced it.
Torn between the burden of h is past and the exigencies of
his present, the narrator feels lost and keeps on oscillat ing
between two opposing situations, hardly reconcilable; it is
a condition that favors and exacerbates the feeling of
double-consciousness. As for the past and the present and
their close relatedness in Invisible Man as well as their
connection with double-consciousness, Anselm Maria
Sellen advances,
In fact the “dualistic whole” [past and
present and all the other opposites that form
dualities] that constitutes the narrator’s
identity has gained the strength Du Bois has
said to be inherent to the double-
consciousness and about which I have
spoken in my analysis of the hospital
episode: The double-consciousness
becomes a source of strength.12
The protagonist in the novel serves as a tool for the
reconciliation of many dissident parts. In addition to the
fact that he reconciles parts of history that are, according
to the historical records written by the supremacists,
irreconcilable, he always mediates between two opposing
temporal poles, attempting to merge them.
Though in Harlem, the narrator is always haunted by
the past; he cannot escape his double-consciousness
because he often confronts overt racism in the North as in
the South; the waiter in the restaurant, out of racial
prejudice, offers him a Southern meal to awaken him of
his daydreams and to remind him that racism is
ubiquitous and so is his double-consciousness. On his
arrival to Harlem, a voyage meant - among other things -
to change the narrator's life altogether through leaving his
past behind him, the Invisib le Man is still kept between
two wo rlds, and the reader “‘senses in Invisible Man a
profound portrait of the suspension between what Arthur
P. Davis called “two worlds”: a world of segregation “not
yet dead” and a world of integration “not fully born.”’13
When the narrator meets Peter Wheatstraw, the cart man,
12 - Anselm M aria Sellen, Fooling Invisibility - A Bakhtinian
Reading of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man:" Applying
Bakhtinian Theory to Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man"
(Germany: Grin Verlag, 2010), pp. 89-90.
13 - M ichael D. Hill, Lena M . Hill, Ralph Ellison's Invisible
Man: A Reference Guide (Westport: Greenwood Press,
2008), p. 142.
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this latter reminds him, once again, of the past the narrator
strives to forget. "I thought you was trying to deny me at
first, but now I be pretty glad to see you . . ." ( I.M.,
p.144), the cart man tells the narrator. A lso, the songs the
cartman sings in the presence of the narrator all b ind the
narrator to his bygone days when he used to hear them at
school, and re mind him that his past is as near to him as
his present.
But it is the narrator's skin which is, above all, the
most concrete reminder of his being black American
because his past and his origins are inscribed on his skin.
His colour will never allow him to put aside his heritage.
This fact creates a kind of frustration for the narrator who
has thought that his journey to the North will free him of
his past complexes. It turns out that the others' behaviour
towards him is determined by his pigmentation which
positions him on the verge of two situations, a situation he
is really in, and a situation to wh ich he aspires and with
which he attempts to forget the past injuries incurred by
racis m. Though in the heart of Harlem, the narrator is
located within the claws of his Southern heritage. When
the Invisible Man has left Wheatstraw, the cart man, to
enter a drugstore, the counterman spontaneously offers
him "the special," made up of "Pork chops, grits, one egg,
hot biscuits and coffee" (I.M., p.145), an act which
distresses the narrator because it is the typical menu
offered to Blacks. The narrator considers this act
prejudicial, partly because it reminds him of his past and
its tragical segregationist attendants.
All these reminders that the unnamed narrator
encounters are meant to prove to him that he has not
crossed the color line yet and that he is always in a liminal
state that exacerbates, ineluctably, his double-
consciousness. In every part of Harlem, the narrator
always meets people of h is caste or objects that make h im
revive his past. When introduced at Liberty Paints, he
finds figures of the South like Lucius Brockway whose
presence confirms, among other things, the indissociable
selves of the African-A mericans. Brockway, as many
other African-A mericans the narrator meets in Harlem,
may stand as the narrator's African self. More important
in the factory is the incident that the narrator goes through
when he loses consciousness because of the explosion
during his struggle with Brockway. This struggle can be
interpreted as a struggle with the narrator's past; and it is
ironical that the narrator recovers only after hearing
stories of his black past heritage. The incident of the
factory plays a major role in triggering o ff the
protagonist's hidden and latent past. At this mo ment, the
Invisible Man's past experiences are revived, rekindled,
and given a free rein. Like a purgatory, the block in the
factory serves to eliminate the blurred vision of the
narrator. "It was as though in this short block," says the
Invisible Man, "I was forced to walk past everyone I'd
ever known" (I.M., p. 357). The incident in the factory
serves, also, to revive all past experiences fro m a p resent
stance, the very adequate narrative technique that suits the
condition of African-A mericans and which is adopted by
Ellison.
Mary Rambo, the wo man who nurses the narrator
and shelters him after his experience in the factory, stands
as another pro minent reminder. She insinuates to the
narrator that he has not totally b roken with his past, and
that he still occupies a liminal state. It is to be emphasized
that the narrator is welco me by Mary at the very time
when he has been rejected by Harlem and its exploitative
dimension embodied by the Liberty Paints Factory. That
Mary is a symbol of the past is unquestionable. In her
home the Invisible Man recovers the high values of the
South. And it is also important that the narrator decides to
embrace the Brotherhood when he is living with Mary,
after a long hesitation. The narrator's indecision towards
enrolling with the Brotherhood is another indication of h is
two warring selves as well as of his inability to
successfully merge these two selves at this stage of his
life
