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A History of Personal Identification—Growth of the Orator in Invisible Man
ZHANG Ting
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2016.01.001
Sichuan International Studies University, Chongqing, China
The notion of invisibility in Invisible Man is spoken out by the protagonist’s growth as an orator. Rather than a recursive retrieving of his identity throughout the narrative, the invisible man reinvents his identity in his pursuit of pure persuasion. Both being terms in the Burkean system of literature rhetoric, pure persuasion, and identification become one for the unconscious purpose and the other for the symbolic action respectively in the protagonist-speaker’s growth from an ideal emulator to speaker-audience mediator. In his identification with the audience and his ardent pursuit of pure persuasion, he paradoxically finds himself distanced from both his identity-to-be and the identity of his audience, with great division in-between. Though temporary corporation is achieved and occasional identification is resolved in the last two speeches, the protagonist only finds himself in a rhetorical context which is much more varied and more manipulative than he imagined. Such a realization renders the invisible man invisible again from the public stadium, who decides to resort to the pen for a life-long identification with the broader battlefield of racial discontinuity.
Invisible Man, Kenneth Burke, pure persuasion, identification, division, race
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