الفهرس 
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Abstract
The thesis is a comparative study of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967), exploring identity crisis in different cultures. Both African-Americans and post-colonials undergo an identity crisis. This is because African-Americans have to adhere to the norms of the white majority in order to be accepted in society, and post-colonials regard themselves as inferior and therefore, resort to mimicry in an attempt to assert an identity. However, this only leads to inauthenticity and loss of identity for both African-American and post-colonials. Thus, both novels are concerned with the question of identity, and both novelists’ backgrounds contributed to their fiction. The protagonists of both novels undergo an identity crisis and struggle to assert an authentic identity. The thesis examines writing as a healing process and a means of transcending mimicry and restoring order to a chaotic existence. The two novels are analysed within the frame of Homi Bhabha’s and Stuart Hall’s post-colonial theories. The thesis examines whether African- Americans and post-colonial men need mimicry in order to preserve themselves and investigates the possibility of identity being formed by affiliation to one’s social group and from one’s difference from other social groups.