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“Self-consciousness is an acute sense of self-awareness. It is a preoccupation with oneself, as opposed to the philosophical state of self-awareness, which is the awareness that one exists as an inpidual being; although some writers use both terms interchangeable or synonymously” (Wei 3). It consists of one’s psychological disposition, inpidual mental characteristics and psychological process. Because of people have a sense of self-consciousness, they can control and adjust their own ideological and behavior. So people can form a complete inpiduality.
II. A Brief Introduction of Ralph Ellison and Invisible Man
2.1 Life Experience of Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison was a writer and scholar. He was born in Oklahoma City on March 1, 1914, named by his father after Ralph Waldo Emerson Ellison. When he was 3 years old, his father died and then he was raised up by his mother and servants. Ellison entered the Tuskegee Institute on a scholarship to study music in 1933. The institution later served as the prototype of the college the protagonist attended in Invisible Man. Even though he was “a music major at Tuskegee, he was also one who read a lot, who lived in books as well as in the sound of music” (Callahan 323). Three years later, he went to New York and met the black writer Richard Wright there. With the help of Richard Wright, his literary career started in 1937. Ellison was famous for his novel Invisible Man (1952), which won the National Book Award in 1953. Ellison states in his National Book Award acceptance speech that he considered the novel’s chief significance was its experimental attitude. Rejecting the idea of social protest, he did not want to write another protest novel. He created an open style, one that did not restrict his ideas to a movement but was more free-flowing in its delivery. What Ellison finally settled on was a style based heavily upon modern symbolism. The central theme of Ralph Ellison’s writing is searching for identity, a search that he sees as central to American literature and the American experience. Ralph Ellison died of pancreatic cancer on April 16, 1994, and was buried in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. Although he died many years, his literary creations still have a big influence on literary writing all over the world.