ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a comparative analysis of what may seem to be strange print-fellows, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Ellison conceived of the experiences of his protagonist as ‘a number of rites of passage, rites of initiation’. His protagonist is at once an individual character and a representative type. Beside the realistic elements in his characters and plots, Ellison explicitly calls attention to their symbolic and mythic meanings as well. He identifies one of the purposes of his novel as revealing the ‘sacred values’ of American national identity through dramatization of ritual reversals of those values as they inform collective and individual behaviour. Ellison sees ignorance of the meaning and function of America’s own inherited and amalgamated rituals as a great social and psychological fault. In his stated allegorical purpose, Ellison acquires the weight of literary responsibility sought by Greek drama and Christian romantic epic.
