Stylistic convergence is an essential component in any prosaic text system and serves as the most indicative means for expressing the author’s feelings and emotions. Expression with the joint use of individual stylistic devices is superimposed on the interpretation of another, and the overall stylistic effect as a result of such accumulation increases significantly. In a literary text, the perception of the world is often complicated by the writer’s strong desire to take into account all the interacting factors of life and connect them with a variety of pathways and figures of speech. For examining the language, phrasing, and symbolism of the passage, I have selected three paragraphs, starting with the words “My hole is warm and full of light” and ending with “I’ve already begun to wire the wall.”
The story is full of allegories; consequently, the emphasis on light, light bulbs, and illumination attempts can be considered as referring to the process of intellectual enlightenment. This awareness helps to analyze the following author’s statement and stylistic devices. Ellison uses several wordplays. For instance, the expression “to feel my vital aliveness” is a clear tautology. There are multiple examples of using the alliteration technique – “It allows me to feel my vital aliveness”, “speak of the spiral of history,” “to wire the wall.” These alliterations serve to depict and imagine a picture that helps readers to understand its meaning.
The narrator focuses on the most lighted places in New York – Broadway and the Empire State Building: “I do not exclude Broadway. Or the Empire State Building on a photographer’s dream night.” Such use of punctuation marks, creating this sentence fragment, helps to avoid ambiguity and clarifies the sense of the phrase that should be interpreted only as needed by the author. The use of parentheses – “(an important distinction, I’ve heard)” and “(by contradiction, I mean)” is a device of intimacy, not confidence. It feels like the narrator tells the reader the secret, his thought that should be told in confidence. The whole sentence included in parentheses – “(Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy)” might be considered as the piece of advice given to the closest friend to prevent him or her from being hurt.
Ellison often repeats his expressions to make readers pay more attention to the words said before or to convince them to think in a specific way. For instance, the first two sentences in the row are “My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light”. Then, the narrator focuses on the process of how he obtained this light. The sound [l] present in the text is repeated: “I love light… light, desire light, love light”. Regarding the tricks of orthography in Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”, the letters “l” and “i” appear to be the symbol of thunderstorm activity, as the topic of the following paragraphs is electricity.
In the sentence “An act of sabotage, you know”, Ellison uses the expression “you know” to show a pause or hesitation. In the sentence “I have been boomeranged across my head so much that I now can see the darkness of lightness,” the author uses the technique of verbalization, namely he creates a new form of the word “boomerang” – “boomeranged” to convey the maximum of meaning.
One of the interesting details in this piece of text is the word “more-expensive-to-operate.” Such word constructions are a logical development of the analytical type language and have several dozens of building models. Still, they are often formed occasionally to give the text more expressiveness, and most importantly, they serve to categorize reality. The expression “pardon me” appears in the document to apologize after being slightly rude – “Those two spots are among the darkest of our whole civilization-pardon me, our whole culture.” It means that the narrator perhaps did now want to insult the results of the development of the whole population. Concerning another understanding, the purpose of implementing these words might be a mocking effect.
In these three paragraphs, readers can observe the narrator’s desire to find a light. The vivid stylistic coloring opens up the difference between seeing through physical eyes using the light around him and perceiving reality through the inner eyes. After understanding the possibility of perceiving his invisibility as the positive outcome, as nobody could see him, the narrator reflects that he might receive enough electricity from the company Monopolated Light & Power which is the allegory to the capitalist world. Moreover, a metaphor is the transference of meaning from one word to another. The perception of the term hole is full of darkness, while the word “light” illustrates the light, sun, and bright colors. That leads to the metaphor of Ellison of African American and white people and the “false dichotomies” by splitting and polarizing the world into black-and-white oppositions, in this case – dark and light sides.
The number 1369 is not occasional. The narrator points out that light bulbs will help him illuminate his hole, but 1936 is when Ellison arrived in New York City, and his career as a writer started developing. Ellison’s numeric pun also depicts his talent to arrange words, unite elements of real fact and imagination.