Success in failure fragmentation and coherence in invisible man and a portrait of the artist as a young man

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to understand the development of the self and the individual identity in modern literature through the examination of the characters of Stephen Dadelus in James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the Invisible Man in Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man. The struggle the protagonists had to undergo to create their identity transcends the boundaries of Soren Kierkegaards classification of the aesthete, the ethical and the religious and forces a reordering of those stages. Both Stephen and the Invisible Man eventually create their individual set of norms that celebrate and spiritualize the aesthete in its artistic creativity. Moreover, they willingly choose to commit to those norms. The choice made by Ellison and Joyces protagonists is a failed attempt at coherence. This failure however, is classified in this thesis as a successful form of failure for it allows the modern individual self to reconcile with its fragmented aspects and to turn this fragmentation into a successfully created form of art.