【正文】 son published Shadow and Act, a collection of essays, and began to teach at Rutgers University and Yale University, while continuing to work on his novel. In 1967, Ellison experienced a major house fire at his home in Plainfield Massachusetts, in which he claimed more than 300 pages of his second novel manuscript were lost. Writing essays about both the black experience and his love for jazz music, Ellison continued to receive major awards for his work. In 1969 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom。 the following year, he was made a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France and became a permanent member of the faculty at New York University as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities, serving from 1970 to 1980. In 1975, Ellison was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters and his hometown of Oklahoma City honored him with the dedication of the Ralph Waldo Ellison Library. Continuing to teach, Ellison published mostly essays, and in 1984, he received the New York City College39。s Langston Hughes Medal. In 1985, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. In 1986, his Going to the Territory was published. This is a collection of seventeen essays that included insight into southern novelist William Faulkner and Ellison39。s friend Rich Wright, as well as the music of Duke Ellington and the contributions of African Americans to America’s national identity. Invisible Man Invisible Man is a novel written by Ralph Ellison in 1952. It addresses many of the social and intellectual issues facing AfricanAmericans early in the twentieth century, including Black Nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. 美國“黑人文學(xué)”對自我身份的探尋 —— 以拉爾夫埃利森《看不見的人》為例 Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity. Invisible Man won the . National Book Award for Fiction in 1953. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Invisible Man nieenth on its list of the 100 best Englishlanguage novels of the 20th century. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best Englishlanguage Novels from 1923 to 20xx. Invisible Man was a book that changed the way white Americans thought about black Americans. It also changed the way black Americans thought about themselves. And it caused major disputes among both black and white critics. Critic Harold Bloom considers Invisible Man one of the finest American novels of the 20th century. Like many other novels, Ellison’s story is a series of experiences as the storyteller learns to deal with life. Yet, unlike other novels, Invisible Man takes place in a dreamlike atmosphere in the United States. It is a world where dreams e close to reality, and the real world looks like a frightening dream. The man telling his story in Invisible Man lives in a hidden underground space. But to prove that he exists, at least to himself, he has lit his underground room with one thousand three hundred sixtynine lights. They remain lit with power he has stolen from the electric pany. In much of Ellison’s novel the person telling the story is a victim, usually of white people, but also of some blacks. He both loves and hates the world. He plans some day to leave his underground shelter. He says that as a man he is willing to believe that ―even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all.‖ The man telling the story says that as a boy, white men covered his eyes with a white men tell the boy to blindly fight other black boys. The blacks are forced to fight each other to please whites. At the end of novel the story has moved from the American South to North. There are riots in Harlem, the black area of New York City. Instead of ten black children fighting each other blindly, grown black men are batting each other to thedeath. Black still are having their strength turned upon themselves. 2. The lost of the narrator’s identity The confusion of society 美國“黑人文學(xué)”對自我身份的探尋 —— 以拉爾夫埃利森《看不見的人》為例 In the late 1920s or early 1930s, the narrator lived in the South. Since he is a favored public speaker, he is invited to make a speech to a group of important white men in his town. These men reward him with a briefcase containing a scholarship to a prestigious blackcollege, but only after humiliating him by forcing him to fight in a ―battle royal‖ in which he is pitted against other young black men, all blindfolded, in a boxing ring. After the battle royal, the white men force the youths to scramble over an electrified rug in order to snatch at fake gold coins. The narrator has a dream that night in which he imagines that his scholarship is actually a piece of paper reading ―To Whom It May Concern . . . Keep This NiggerBoy Running.‖ Three years later, the narrator bee a student at the college. He is asked to drive a wealthy white trustee of the college, Mr. Norton, around the campus. Norton talks incessantly about his daughter, and then shows an undue interest in the narrative of Jim True blood, a poor, uneducated black man who impregnated his own daughter. After hearing this story, Norton needs a drink, and the narrator takes him to the Golden Day, a saloon and brothel that normally serves black men. A fight breaks out among a group of mentally imbalanced black veterans at the bar, and Norton passes out during the chaos. He is tended by one of the veterans, who claim to be a doctor and who taunts both Norton and the narrator for their blindness regarding race relations. Back at the college, the narrator listens to a long, impassioned sermon by the Reverend Homer A. Barbee on the subject of the college’s Founder, whom the blind Barbee glorifies with poetic language. After the sermon, the narrator is chastised by the college president, Dr. Bledsoe, who has learned of the narrator’s misadventures with Norton at the old sla