Because the narrator is black, whites refuse to see him as an actual, three-dimensional person hence, he portrays himself as invisible and describes them as blind. The metaphors of invisibility and blindness allow for an examination of the effects of racism on the victim and the perpetrator. The Prologue of Invisible Man introduces the major themes that define the rest of the novel. He states that the beginning of his story is really the end. Now, the narrator hibernates in his invisibility, preparing for his unnamed action.

He describes his anguished, aching need to make others recognize him, and says he has found that such attempts rarely succeed. Being invisible sometimes makes him doubt whether he really exists. The narrator says that his invisibility can serve both as an advantage and as a constant aggravation. It is as though other people are sleepwalkers moving through a dream in which he does not appear.

He explains that his invisibility owes not to some biochemical accident or supernatural cause but rather to the unwillingness of other people to notice him as he is black. This obscurity emphasizes his status as an “invisible man” as which he introduces himself in the Prologue of the novel. The narrator remains a voice and never emerges as an external and quantifiable presence. The names that he is given in the hospital and in the Brotherhood, the name of his college, even the state in which the college is located all go unidentified. Ironically, though he dominates the novel, the narrator remains somewhat obscure to the reader most notably, he never reveals his name. Additionally, because the narrator relates the story in the first person, the text does not truly probe the consciousness of any other figure in the story. The narrative and thematic concerns of the story revolve around the development of the narrator as an individual. The narrator not only tells the story of Invisible Man, he is also its principal character. Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man is a bildungsroman, a type of novel that chronicles a character’s moral and psychological growth. Causes and Effects of Invisibility And Blindness

Invisible man prologue pdf