Analysis of Theme Through The Portrayal of The Protagonist in Richard Wright's 'Native son' and Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man'.

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ABSTRACT

Dalam tugas akhir ini saya akan menganalisis tema melalui penggambaran

tokoh utama dari novel Native Son karya Richard Wright dan Invisible Man karya Ralph Ellison. Kedua novel di atas menggambarkan bagaimana sistem segregasi mempengaruhi kehidupan warga kulit hitam di Amerika Serikat.

Segregasi adalah salah satu bentuk dari rasisme yang merupakan pemisahan suatu kelompok masyarakat etnis tertentu dengan kelompok masyarakat lainnya.

Tujuan dari sistem segregasi adalah untuk mencapai kesetaraan walaupun kehidupan masyarakatnya terpisah-pisah. Tetapi dalam praktiknya, segregasi memberikan dampak yang buruk bagi warga kulit hitam.

Dalam novel Native Son sang tokoh utama, Bigger Thomas, digambarkan sebagai seorang yang getir, pesimistik, munafik, penuh rasa takut, dan penuh

prasangka buruk. Dari karakteristik di atas, tema yang bisa didapat adalah bahwa sistem segregasi dapat menimbulkan pengaruh yang buruk pada diri seseorang. Sedangkan tokoh utama dari novel Invisible Man pada awalnya digambarkan sebagai

orang yang ambisius, optimistik dan cerdas, tetapi pada akhirnya ia berubah menjadi orang yang pasif, pesimistik dan licik. Dari karakteristik di atas, tema yang bisa

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Maranatha Christian University negatif. Dengan membahas tema dari kedua novel tersebut dapat ditarik kesimpulan

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CHAPTER TWO: ANALYSIS OF THEME THROUGH THE PORTRAYAL OF THE PROTAGONIST IN RICHARD WRIGHT’S NATIVE SON………..6

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APPENDICES

Synopsis of Richard Wright’s Native Son

The novel is about a poor uneducated boy, Bigger Thomas, who lives in a one-room house with his mother, his sister Vera and his brother Buddy in a slum in

Chicago. His mother often tells him to get a job so that the family can have a better living, but Bigger joins the neighborhood gang instead and often robs people and stores in order to get money. After having a feud with his gang, Bigger who is afraid

of the whites reluctantly agrees to work for the Daltons as their chauffer.

Bigger’s job is to drive Mr. Dalton’s daughter, Mary Dalton, to her school.

However, Mary orders him to take her to meet her boyfriend, Jan Erlone, who is a member of a communist party and Bigger is not allowed to tell this to anyone. On the way home, Mary is too drunk to walk on her own, so Bigger has to carry her to her

bedroom. Bigger is afraid that if anyone finds out about all this, he will lose his job. Suddenly, Mary’s blind mother comes into the room to check on her. Afraid of being

discovered, Bigger covers Mary’s face with a pillow to silence her. Unfortunately,

Mary dies because of what Bigger does.

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Maranatha Christian University kidnapping and signs it with Jan’s signature so that the police will assumes that Jan is

responsible for Mary’s disappearance. Bigger tells everything to his girlfriend, Bessie. Nonetheless, Bigger is paranoid about the possibility that she will betray him,

so he murders Bessie in order to keep his secret. Bigger tries to escape from the mob that is chasing him but he is soon captured. In the court, he is accused of rape and

murder and in the end he is executed on the electric chair.

Synopsis of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

Invisible Man tells about the life of a nameless protagonist who is a male

African-American in his twenties. The protagonist comes from the low-class society

in the South. He manages to get college education in a segregated school. He is an intelligent student and an excellent orator; thus he receives a scholarship from the school. However, when he is assigned to be the guide for one of the trustees of his

school, Mr. Norton, he accidentally shows the real situation of how the black people live. Consequently, the principal, Mr. Bledsoe, thinks that his action will endanger the reputation of the college and he revokes the protagonist’s scholarship.

With letters of introduction from Mr. Bledsoe, the protagonist decides to go to New York in order to get a job so that he can pay tuition and go back to college.

However, it turns out that Mr. Bledsoe has deceived him. Forced to live in the North without having any chance to return, the protagonist lives in Harlem with a woman named Mary Rambo as he is jobless. By chance he witnesses a black couple being

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Maranatha Christian University His action impresses Brother Jack, the Leader of the Brotherhood and he asks

the protagonist to join him so that he can use his oratorical ability for a greater cause. Thus he joins the Brotherhood and becomes a prominent figure in the organization.

However, soon he is aware that he is nothing but a tool for the Brotherhood to reach their ambition. He realizes that in the white society he is unrecognized because the

society refuses to see him as an individual but merely as stereotypical African-American. At the end of the story, he is involved in a riot and amidst the chaotic situation he accidentally finds an unused cellar. There he gives up all his ambitions

and decides to hibernate before he is ready to return to the society. .

Biography of Richard Wright

Richard Nathaniel Wright was born near Natchez, Mississippi, on September 4, 1908. His father, Nathaniel, was an illiterate sharecropper. His mother, Ella

Wilson, was a well-educated school teacher. Wright graduated from the Smith Robertson Junior High School in Jackson in June 1925. After leaving school, Wright went to Lanier High School but dropped out after a few weeks and then he worked.

In spring 1924, a local black newspaper the Southern Register printed The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre, which is his first short story. Three years later, he moved

to Chicago. In 1937 he moved to New York and became the editor of Daily Worker. In 1938 his four short stories were published together as Uncle Tom’s Children. His first novel Native Son was published in 1940 and it is regarded as Wright's greatest

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Maranatha Christian University then they separated. In 1941 he married Ellen Poplar, a white member of Communist

Party, and they had two daughters, Julia (1942) and Rachel (1949).

Wright suffered from amoebic dysentery and died suddenly of an apparent

heart attack at the Clinique Eugène Gibez in Paris. Richard Wright died on November 28, 1960 at the age of fifty-two.

Source: Hoffman 291, Sparknotes

Biography of Ralph Ellison

Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in Oklahoma City on March 1, 1914. His father, Lewis Alfred, was a tradesman and construction worker. He died when Ellison

was three, and his mother supported herself and her son by working as a domestic. Ellison was trained as a musician at Tuskegee Institute from 1933 until 1936. By 1939 he began his writing career. Before the publication of his first novel

Invisible Man, In 1947, he worked as a waiter and as a jazz musician, and he had also

worked in the United States Merchant Marine. He became an editor in Negro Quarterly in 1942. In July 1946, he married Fanny McConnell. They lived in an

apartment on Riverside Drive in the Washington heights section of Manhattan.

In his life, he has received many awards for his book Invisible Man including

the Rosenwald Grant Award in 1945 and the National Book Award in 1953. Ellison was a visiting professor of writing at Yale University since 1964. He was an instructor in Russian and American literature at Bard College from 1958 to 1961,

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Maranatha Christian University On April 16, 1994 he died at the age of eighty due to pancreatic cancer. He

was buried at Trinity Church in Washington Height, New York. His second novel Juneteenth was published in 1999 posthumously.

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CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Background of the Study

Racism is “the belief that humans are subdivided into distinct hereditary

groups that are innately different in their social behavior and mental capacities and

that therefore be ranked as superior and inferior” (Marger 24). In a country, the practice of racism will eventually lead to the act of segregation among its people.

Segregation by definition is “the act or policy of separating people of different races,

religions, or sexes and treating them in a different way” (“Segregation” def.1).

The United States, which claims to be a country of democracy that generally

believes in the equality of opportunity where “each individual should have an equal

chance for success” (Datesman 31), is no exception to the practice of racism in their

society. Since the United States is a country with “great ethnic diversity” (3), the

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inevitable.

With “slightly more than 12 percent of the population, African-Americans are

the largest ethnic minority in the United States.” (Marger 221) Yet looking back at

the history, the African American was to endure a long period of racism in the form

of slavery for more than two centuries. When the Civil War ended, the African-Americans were supposed to be free and to be given equal opportunity as other citizens in the United States since the slavery institution had been abolished.

However, with the segregation system, the white managed to maintain the position of the black as inferior members of the society. Segregation system in the United States

is a system based on the Jim Crow law which is “the name of the racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s” (Pilgrim). With the notion “separate but equal”, the laws

constitute the separation of the whites and the African-American in many aspects in society such as political, economical, social, and educational aspects. With this separation, the African-Americans are often put in disadvantageous position. This

inevitably widens the social gap between the two races.

Richard Wright, being “the first African-American author whose work

appears on the national bestseller lists” (Rozakis 305), openly shows his concern

about the issue of racism related to the black people through his best-selling work Native Son, which was published in 1940. The novel is different in comparison with

other protest novels written by other black authors at that time. “Until Native Son,

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but Wright depicts the novel as “a brutal portrait of a poor black man spurred on to

murder by the oppression and hatred of the white world” (Rozakis 305). Through the

portrayal of Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of the novel which became a controversy

at that time, Wright was aware that “the social situation of blacks causes them to

become violent, too” (High 215). Bigger Thomas becomes a murderer “not out of

choice, but as a result of the environmental influences beyond his control” (Senna 6).

Ralph Ellison is another African-American author who was also concerned about the situation that the African-American had to face at that time. Thus he clearly

shows it in his one and only novel, Invisible Man, which was published in 1952. The novel “expounds the theme of black invisibility in an American society that willfully

ignores black” (Rozakis 355).The book has won many awards and is often regarded

as “an established classic of modern American literature” (Hoffman 295). Ellison

shows his concern about “why most protagonists of Afro-American fiction (not to

mention the black characters in fiction written by whites) were without intelligent depth. Too often they were figures caught up in the most intense forms of social struggle, subject to the most extreme forms of human predicament but yet seldom

able to articulate the issues which tortured them” (Ellison xix). In his novel Ellison

creates the protagonist as a nameless narrator who “represents many intelligent young

African-Americans of this generation” (356) He “dreams success through humility

and hard work” (356) but in the end, he eventually must realize that the society itself

prevents him from reaching it.

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“controlling idea or its central insight” (Perrine 102) and both novels share similar

ideas which emphasize the authors’ concern and criticism about the life of the

African-American as minority that experience racism in form of segregation from the

white society. I will reveal the theme through the portrayal of the protagonist since

protagonist, which by definition is “the central character in the conflict, whether he be

a sympathetic or unsympathetic person” (Perrine 44), holds central role in the novel.

Both novels have the same setting of place and time, the United States in the 1940’s,

a period when the segregation system is still in practice in the United States. Two

themes which are related to racism can be obtained because the protagonists of both novels go through similar experience regarding segregation although they have

different background and different way of coping with their experience. Moreover, both themes reveal the undeniable fact that the practice of racism in the form of segregation has negative effects on each protagonist as an individual in many aspects

of his life.

Statement of the Problems

1. What is the theme in Richard Wright’s Native Son?

2. What is the theme in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man?

3. How do the portrayals of the protagonists help in revealing the themes?

Purpose of the Study

1. The purpose of the study is to reveal the theme in Richard Wright’s Native

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Maranatha Christian University 2. The purpose of the study is to reveal the theme in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible

Man.

3. The purpose of the study is to show how the portrayals of the protagonists

help in revealing the themes.

Method of Research

I use the library research that includes reading and understanding the primary texts which are the novels and other references, in order to make an objective and a

non-superficial analysis in the process of the study. Next, I analyze the theme through the portrayal of the protagonist in each of the novels. Lastly, I draw some conclusions

from my analysis.

Organization of the Thesis

The organization of the thesis is divided into four chapters, which are preceded by Preface and Abstract. Chapter One is Introduction, which contains Background of the Study, Statement of the Problem, Purpose of the Study, Method of

Research, and Organization of the Thesis. Chapter Two contains the analysis of the

theme through the portrayal of the protagonist in Richard Wright’s Native Son.

Chapter Three contains the analysis of the theme through the portrayal of the protagonist in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Chapter Four contains the conclusion of the analysis. The thesis ends with the Bibliography and Appendix, which consist of

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CHAPTER FOUR

CONCLUSION

After analyzing the theme through the portrayal of the protagonist in Richard

Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, in this chapter I am going to

draw a conclusion regarding the negative effect of segregation based on the life of the

protagonist from each novel.

Richard Wright’s Native Son depicts the life of a male African-American,

Bigger Thomas, who is struggling to live in segregated society. Bigger lives all his life while bearing fear of the whites. Bigger assumes that the whites are superior beings that control his whole life. At the same time, he also feels hatred toward the

whites because he thinks that the whites have everything while as a black he has nothing. The novel shows that the segregation system brings out the worst of Bigger

Thomas because he eventually becomes a pessimistic, bitter, prejudiced, pretentious and apprehensive person. The novel also shows that segregation system not only negatively affects Bigger as an individual but also brings negative impact to the

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Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man tells a story of the life of a young nameless

African-American who also struggles to find his place in segregated society. The nameless protagonist starts out as an ambitious, optimistic and intelligent person. He

wants to be successful in life and he believes that even in segregated society he can achieve this through hard work and humility. However, due to the segregation system

he has to face the reality that there is a certain limit to which a black can do in such society. He realizes that in segregated society no matter what a black man does he will always be invisible. Thus at the end, he becomes a cunning, pessimistic and

passive person, which shows that the segregation system can change a person’s characteristics from positive to negative.

There are several significant similarities between the protagonists of the two novels which I have analyzed. Both Bigger Thomas and the nameless protagonist are young male African-American in their twenties. They both live in the United States,

during the period when segregation is still in practice. Both of them come from the low-class society and both of them live in poverty. They experience difficulties in finding their place in segregated society. Both of them have to experience the act of

racism in the form of segregation because they are African-American. Both Bigger and the nameless protagonist have pessimistic point of view about life in segregated

society. In the end, both of them become social outcasts. Bigger accidentally murders a white woman and is executed on the electric chair while the nameless protagonist abandons his dream and withdraws himself from the society by living underground.

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Maranatha Christian University of the United States, Chicago, while the nameless protagonist is born and raised in the

southern part of the United States. Thus each protagonist has a different perspective about the North. The nameless protagonist thinks of the North as the land of hope and

opportunity for he assumes that there will be no segregation there as in his hometown in the South. On the contrary, Bigger Thomas, who grows up in the North, knows that

the situation in the North is not much different from the South where segregation is still in practice. Moreover, Bigger Thomas’s education is only as far as the eighth

grade because he does not have the financial support and he has to work for his

family instead. Meanwhile, the nameless protagonist manages to obtain a scholarship so that he can get college education in a segregated college even though in order to

get that scholarship he has to go through an inhuman way. He has to participate in the battle royal, a gladiator-like competition, where he has to fight his fellow African-Americans like animals for the amusement of the whites higher up in his town.

Lastly, both protagonists show different responses as they face the similar experience of racism in form of segregation in the society. Bigger Thomas gives a really negative response toward segregation. He thinks that things are not supposed to be this way for

the whites and the blacks. He despises the unfair situation where the blacks cannot get equal opportunities as the whites. He thinks that the whites are responsible for all the

suffering and problems in his life and this triggers fear, hatred and anger within him. On the contrary, unlike Bigger who shows strong hatred and anger toward the society that treats him unfairly, the nameless protagonist in Invisible Man shows a different

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Maranatha Christian University segregation era, there is still a chance for him to be successful in life through

education and hard work. He assumes that by obeying the whites while taking whatever advantages he can get from them, he will be able to gain a successful life

and lead the African-American out of segregation to achieve equality.

The themes of both novels which are obtained through the portrayal of the

protagonist show the negative impacts of the segregation system against an

individual’s life and how the two protagonists from the novel cope with the situation.

In Native Son it can be seen how the segregation system brings out the negative

characteristics of Bigger Thomas while in Invisible Man it is show how segregated society affects the protagonist to a point where his positive characteristics change into negative in order to cope with the segregation system. Both novels show the authors’

concern regarding the situation between the blacks and the whites at that time.

In my opinion, both novels have successfully managed to deliver the authors

criticism regarding the practice of segregation in the United States. These two novels show different responses of African-American in segregated society. Richard Wright creates Bigger Thomas as the representation of the low-class African-American who

finds it difficult to cope with segregation. From the portrayal of Bigger it can be seen how segregation makes him desperate which eventually gives negative influence not

only to himself but also to the society. On the other hand, Ralph Ellison portrays his nameless protagonist as an African-American who obtains the opportunity to get education and has optimistic attitude in life. The protagonist has the potential to be

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Maranatha Christian University society, the African-American will always be put in disadvantageous position no

matter who they are or what they do.

Basically, all human being are created equal no matter what race or skin color

one is born with. Thus for whatever reason there is, the practice of racism in any form cannot be justified. Since the institution of slavery has been abolished, the

African-Americans are supposed to have equal position like other citizens of the United States. However with the segregation system, which is an attempt to separate the life of the black from the white, equality in the United States society still cannot be

realized. Thus, it is impossible to expect equality in society if there is still separation and limitation for any of its members. Both novels show that segregation system

gives more damage than benefit to the African-Americans. In the end, the only way one can live together in harmony with his fellow human beings is by acknowledging and respecting one another as an equal being without being restrained or limited

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Texts:

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, Inc, 1989. Print.

Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1966. Print.

References:

“Ambitious” Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 7th

Edition. London: Oxford

University Press, 2005. Print.

“Apprehensive” Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 7th

“Bitter.” Def. 2. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 7th

“Cunning.” Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 7th

Datesman, Maryanne Kearny. American Ways: An Introduction to American Culture.

Pearson Education, Inc., 2005. Print.

High, Peter B. An Outline of American Literature. New York: Longman, Inc., 1986. Print.

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Maranatha Christian University Iness, Jeanne and James L. Roberts. Cliffnotes on Invisible Man. Nebraska: Cliff

Notes, Inc., 1969. Print.

“Intelligent” Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 7th

Marger, Martin N. Race and Ethnic Relation: America and Global Perspectives

Second Edition. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1991. Print.

“Opitimistic.” Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 7th

“Passive.” Def. 1. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 7th

Edition. London:

Oxford University Press, 2005. Print.

Perrine, Laurence. Story and Structure. New York: HBJ, Inc., 1974. Print.

“Pessimistic” Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 7th

Pilgrim, David. “What Was Jim Crow?” Ferris. Ferris State University.

September 2000. Web. 2 Aug. 2012

“Prejudiced.” Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 7th

“Pretentious.” Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 7th

Roberts, Edgar V. Writing Themes About Literature. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1977. Print.

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“Segregation” Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary 7th Edition. London: Oxford

Senna, Carl. Cliff Notes on Wright’s Black Boy. Nebraska: C.K. Hillegass., 1971.

Print.

SparkNotes. “SparkNote on Invisible Man.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes LLC.

2002. Web. 17 Mar. 2011.

SparkNotes . “SparkNote on Native Son.” SparkNotes.com. SparkNotes