You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike outwith your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. Then too, you're constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.
That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a bio-chemical accident to my epidermis. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination - indeed, everything and anything except me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. More importantly, the underground reveals Ellison engaging in a critique of categorical boundaries and limits which has common spirit with, and often anticipates, the critical project of Derridian thought, thus implying the potential contribution of deconstruction to an ongoing critique of the logic of racial segregation in American society."You are saved," cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained "you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?" -Herman Melville, Benito Cereno Harry : I tell you, it is not me you are looking at, Not me you are grinning at, not me your confidential looks Incriminate, but that other person, if person, You thought I was: let your necrophily Feed upon that carcase… -T.S. I explore the tunnels connecting these texts while uprooting the critical emphasis on ‘progress’ and ‘completion’ germane to linear modes of reading. Through analyzing the chthonic spaces in and of Invisible Man and Three Days Before the Shooting. By reading the chthonic as both a recurrent allegory and organizing principle of his fiction, I approach Ellison's work through a "reading downward"-descending, like Dante, into the depths-as an alternative mode of engagement with his texts. For Ellison, the chthonic is a site of contradiction and paradox in which binary oppositions break down. ‘Chthonic’ (from Ancient Greek χθών, ground, soil, earth) describes that which is ‘dwelling in or beneath the surface of the earth’. This dissertation explores chthonic space in the work of Ralph Ellison.
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