TIME REFERENCE AND QUEST OF IDENTITY OF THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN CHARACTER: INVISIBLE MAN by RALPH ELLISON

The story Un coeur simple [A Simple Heart], the first book of Flaubert’sTrois contes [Three Stories] (1877), places in its foreground the brave figure of servant Félicité and emphasizes the time frame and the psychological analysis of the characters. The narrator loves to manipulate the indexes that refer to time and space in order to individualize each character, following a predetermined way in the economy of the narrative frame. By focusing on the realist writer’s memories of childhood and youth - a writer who is wellknown for the reconstruction of events that create the sensation of reality - we aim to analyze the flow of time that determines the fate of the domestic servant Félicité, in his relationship with the others, the community and the line of action. We intend to emphasize the pattern that builds every character who undergoes the action of time (the initial and the final limit; the obstacle, and the accelerated or the idle time), and the time indexes by using the temporal markers in order to provide the chronology of the story and transform action in reality.