A Quest for an African American Identity in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with the issue of African American identity formation in two important contemporary novels: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Toni Morrison Beloved (1987). While our purpose is to investigate the ways in which the theme of identity in treated in the two novels, our hope is to bring forth their distinctiveness in the African American literary tradition. By exploring the theme of identity in the two novels, I examine the thematic features which reflect the common concerns of the writers as well as the stylistic devices through which they support their thematic preoccupations. By comparing the two novels, we aim to explore the writers’ redefinition of African American identity by taking into account their experimentation at the level of both form and theme