Double Consciousness Invisible Man And The Bluest Eye

Double-Consciousness in Invisible Man and The Bluest Eye W.E.B DuBois was a well-known civil rights activists, Pan-Africanist, and a co-founder of the NAACP. Double-consciousness is a phrase coined by DuBois in his novel The Souls of Black Folks in 1903, which describes the idea of double-consciousness as a state of affairs in which an individual is both representative of and immersed in two distinct ways of life. When DuBois introduced this phrase, he was specifically talking about black Americans in the United States who face a double jeopardy of being identified as black and American while having to deal with the injustices of Jim Crow America. Black Americans, unlike their white counterparts, have this internal conflict of having to identify with their ‘black’ culture, which was stripped from them and deemed improper and the American experience, which denied them of their basic human rights through systematic oppression. Black Americans have always dealt with having to see themselves through the perspective of the society they live in and needing to prove their worth in order to obtain a sense of belonging. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eyes are able to depict the psychological trauma of what double-consciousness does to an individual through the eyes of their main characters who suffer immensely due to their social circumstances. Through racial discontent and self-realization acknowledged in both Ellison s Invisible Man and Morrison’sShow MoreRelatedThe Bluest Eye-Theme of Vision1553 Words   |  7 PagesToni Morrison’s highly acclaimed debut work, The Bluest Eye, is one of unquestionable beauty and intricately woven prose. As a fictional writer, Morrison avails herself of her literary faculties, using her mastery of description in order to convey an unusually lucid picture to the reader. The five senses seem to envelop a great deal of description in the novel, most notably that of sight. As has been discovered by virtue of studying the bra in’s neural and cognitive machinery, vision occupies large