Conflict and double consciousness in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

Abstract

Conflict has been one of the greatest challenges that affect human relationship and coexistence. In a multicultural nation such as the United States of America, interracial conflict has been a dominant and recurrent one which has claimed many lives of the African Americans, and has also negatively affected their psychological makeup to the extent it has created what W.E.B. Du Bois called double consciousness. In view of the above, this paper examines the effects of racial conflict as enunciated in Du Bois’s Principle of Double Consciousness and how Ralph Ellison appropriated this concept in his novel, Invisible Man in his argument for a genuine multicultural United States of America.