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al activities and mental activities. 3.3.2 Cohesion Textual is thus essential to textual unity, and cohesion is the foundation upon which the edifice of coherence is built (Halliday 1985: 94). The textual enables the speaker or writer to construct texts, or connect passages that is situationally relevant, and enables the listeners and readers to distinguish the text from a random set of sentences. In resent two decades, linguists pay more and more attention to the research of textual coherence. Halliday and Hasan point out that the more central tokens, the more coherent the text will be (2001: 124). Invisible Man uses first person narration to tell the narrator’s story. “I” is an obvious central token which unites the text effectively. In prologue, in the second from last, there are 18 “I”s in total. In Chapter 1, the first paragraph, there are 10 “I”s in just five sentences. Besides, in the first paragraph of 25 chapters, “I” is the word that appears the most frequently. Chapter 11, 19, 20, and 24 begin with “I”. Chapter 12, 25, 21, and 22 begin with “when I”. And chapter15 begins with “at first I”. The personal deixis “I” makes the text coherent. If the text itself is relatively long, and uses only one pattern of theme, it will not influence textual coherence, but it will make readers dull. Actually, most of texts use several kinds of themes comprehensively. In Invisible Man, Ellison also uses many other words to take place of “I”, such as my, mine, me, myself, etc, to achieve the lexical cohesion. Conclusion Invisible Man is Ralph Ellison’s masterpiece which has brought him a high reputation. The question why Ellison achieved such a narrative success can not be easily answered. But the interpretation of the first-person narrator and protagonist of the novel is a key explanation to this question. The dominance of the narrator is striking. He is not only the novel’s one and only narrator, but also its predominant protagonist, an invisible black man. Language itself is an enormous and complex semiotic system consisting of many subsystems. The semiotic system should not be seen as a system, but a resource of meaning (朱永生, 严世清 2001: 14). In Invisible Man, first person narration is one of the subsystems that contribute a lot to the text. Based on Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar, especially the three metafunctions, this thesis has discussed the functions of the first person narration briefly. By analyzing the transitivity system, first person narration discloses the backgrounds and conveys new information naturally and fluently. Based on the theories of mood structure and modality, the personalities of the narrator and other characters can be seen thoroughly. The analysis of them-rheme progression and cohesion proves that the first personal pronoun makes the whole text coherent. Above all, the result of the analysis proves that the usage of the first person narration makes the novel more coherent; contain more information, and makes readers and listeners closer to both the narrator and the author of this novel. In Invisible Man, first person narration is characterized by its flexibility and immediacy with the following detailed features: honest presentation of early innocence, growing and then at last understanding of life, and a significant learning process. Works Cited Bernard, W. Bell. The Contemporary African American Novel : Its Folk roots and Modern Literary Branches. Beijing : University of Massachu