Writing: (1) One three-page research paper that develops the topic from the first assignment
(2) Typed responses to quotes from Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Attendance
Punctuality
Ralph Ellison Quotes - Assignment
• Copy the quote into your notebook and write an explanation of what you believe it means.
• Write a commentary or a reaction to it, using examples from life, literature, art, or your imagination. Each commentary should be about 200 words. Rough drafts may be written or typed. Final drafts should be spell-checked, grammar checked, emailed, and shared out to the class. Your writing will be posted on the class Blogspot by first names and the first initial of your last name.
- "I am an invisible man....I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."
- "What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?"
- "It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naive. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been borht with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!"
- "When I discover who I am, I’ll be free"
- "Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat."
- "And I knew that it was better to live out one's absurdity than to die for that of others."
- "I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now I've tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth. No one was satisfied"
- "I am an invisible man. No I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe: Nor am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, simply because people refuse to see me. "
- "Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are."
- "And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own."
- "Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by. "
- "All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: that I am nobody but myself."
- "Please, a definition: A hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action."
- "I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinions of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man."
- "Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me."
- "In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live."
- "The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically."
- “Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.”
- “I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer.”
