The narrator’s emphasis on education and perseverance in believing in its value helped him in his journey towards discovering his own identity because he was eager to learn and absorbed much information from the world around him. He was able to see society on a grander scale than only the circle of people he knew, and therefore was able to more accurately peg his own placement in the world—an invisible man seen by none in society. Because he was educated, the narrator was more conscious of himself and his place within society.
When the narrator heads north to find a job in New York City, he is naïve and has little idea of what he may do there. When he learns of his permanent expulsion from college and that none of the seven letters he brought with him from Dr. Bledsoe will result in him finding employment, the narrator first begins to metamorphose into the invisible man. With growing feelings of rejection on a personal level and invisibility on a societal scale, the narrator starts to wonder if other people even take notice of him.
He finds work at a paint factory, and before his ideas of invisibility can be further developed, much of the narrator’s memory is wiped out in an accident. The narrator was personally targeted by his boss at the Liberty Paint factory, Lucius Brockway. Brockway had a paranoiac fear that all assistants assigned to him intended ultimately to usurp his position at the factory. At this point in the novel, much development in the narrator’s internal development is lost, because he is unable to remember much of his recent past. The narrator cannot even remember his own name when interrogated by doctors and factory supervisors.
However, his grandfather’s advice often remains on his mind. Although the narrator does not yet understand or implement it, the words spoken by his grandfather still haunt him. The narrator is thrust into an orating position at the Brotherhood, a communist organization aiming to create equality across racial lines, after making a rousing speech at the eviction of an elderly couple in Harlem. The narrator becomes very involved with the Brotherhood, eventually developing into a powerful figure to the people of Harlem and a symbol of progress for members of the Brotherhood.
However, there are hints that things are not what they seem at the organization. When the narrator is unable to consult the committee of leaders about holding funeral ceremonies for slain Brother Tod Clifton, he decides it will be best if he thinks for himself. The narrator proceeds on his “personal responsibility,” deciding to hold a funeral for Brother Clifton despite his departure from the Brotherhood just before his death. He tells this to the committee, which makes all decisions of note in the Brotherhood on an important decision, but he is criticized and demoted for thinking on his feet. Brother Jack, the white man who hired him, tells him, “you were not hired to think,” (469) and other members of the committee shared similar feelings of disapproval and disappointment in the narrator’s actions.
It is after this confrontation that the narrator realizes he is only a puppet in the Brotherhood’s larger plan of infiltrating society on a larger scale, and that the individual is not important to the goals of the group. He is not actually a leader in the community, but a voice box for the opinions of the organization’s board of directors. The Brotherhood is fully willing to sacrifice the people of Harlem and their social consciousness for the greater good of the people at large. As long as their vision is on its way to proliferation on a grander scale, members of the Brotherhood did not care if certain demographics had to be given up. When the narrator learns this, he finally understands how fundamentally flawed the Brotherhood’s vision is. But he determines that he cannot abandon the Brotherhood—“If I left it, I’d be nowhere,” (478) he says.
Instead, the narrator decides to implement his grandfather’s advice, which he is now beginning to understand more fully. “If I couldn’t help them to see the reality of our lives I would help them to ignore it until it exploded in their faces,” (511) the narrator says of the Brothers he has been working under for months. Like his grandfather told him, the narrator decides to “live with your head in the lion’s mouth…overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open” (16). Acting as though he agrees and supports the Brotherhood’s vision when in reality he sees the ultimate error in their philosophy, the narrator functions as he had before his realization. He follows orders and implements plans created by higher-ups, but hopes that eventually something cataclysmic will occur, proving his correctness and the inaccuracy of the Brotherhood’s vision. The advice from his grandfather inspires him to action and gives him the drive needed to fight back.
The riot in Harlem is the answer to his hopes. Extreme violence and widespread bloodshed are inflicted on, and by, the people of Harlem, and the Brotherhood’s contingency in Harlem is destroyed and overtaken by Ras the Exhorter. Ras encourages the violence and urges solidarity along racial lines, telling the black men to fight the white oppressor and inflict more violence against their aggressors, including the Brotherhood in this group. The narrator goes to Harlem during the riots after receiving a phone call from the Brotherhood, and is shot by a policeman. Instead of calming the riots, the narrator follows several aggressors and even takes part in the arson of a slum tenement. He never reaches the Brotherhood offices, and in fact never sees any of the Brothers again.
At this point in his journey, the narrator has begun to think that he is invisible, and his fate as Invisible Man is secured when he falls into a manhole while trying to evade men who are chasing him. In the dark, underground, he is physically invisible and cannot be seen by his pursuers. Having reached the conclusion of his physical journey, he continues to strive towards self-realization, and comes to the ultimate termination of this as well when he states in all certainty that he is invisible. “I’m an invisible man and it placed me in a hole—or showed me the hole I was in, if you will—and I reluctantly accepted the fact. What else could I have done? Once you get used to it, reality is as irresistible as a club, and I was clubbed into the cellar before I caught the hint. Perhaps that’s the way it had to be” (572).
The narrator has now found his identity; although the thing he discovers is that he lacks an identity and is instead the absence of individualism, the absence of anything seen. He is invisible in multiple ways, not only physically invisible. He is invisible in society because he hides himself in a secret underground room, because he is black and is often seen not as a man but as an animal or lesser being, and because he has no identity of his own. His withdrawal from society at the end of the novel allows him to form his identity and forge his own way in the world. He believes he is invisible and there is nothing he can do to change this, so instead he decides to create a life for himself as best he can as Invisible Man.
The narrator does not hate his invisibility, and in fact through the course of his journeys has learned to appreciate being overlooked. “It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen,” (3) the narrator explains in the prologue. He first learned that going unobserved can be beneficial when he disguised himself in dark glasses and a flamboyant white hat. While dressed this way, the narrator is able to walk past Ras the Exhorter unnoticed. It is invisibility that saves his life during the riots, when he falls into the coal pit and cannot be seen by the men following him. His physical invisibility as well as his deeper psychological attitude of being invisible helped him several times throughout the course of the novel. Because he realizes his fate as Invisible Man is inevitable, he embraces this identity and learns how to benefit from his position in society.
While in the utter darkness in the manhole, the narrator has to create light somehow in order to find his way out. Luckily, the men chasing him dropped a book of matches down the manhole before replacing its cover. The narrator has only this book of matches and his briefcase, but these two items are enough because the briefcase is filled with papers. He ignites the only documents he has connecting him with a past and an identity. “I started with my high-school diploma, applying one precious match with a feeling of remote irony, even smiling as I saw the swift but feeble light push back the gloom” (567). His diploma, representing his black Southern roots, is the least important in his current and future life, and therefore the first to go. Next to be destroyed by fire was Brother Clifton’s insulting grinning paper doll, symbolizing the disillusionment Clifton, and later the narrator, felt with the Brotherhood’s ideals and philosophy. The narrator then lit the anonymous letter, followed by the slip of paper with his Brotherhood name given to him by Brother Jack.
It is at this point that he notices the two are written in the same handwriting, and his disgust with the Brotherhood’s flawed mission is complete. These two papers both represent the narrator’s leadership position as an orator for the Brotherhood, a part of his life he will never return to and does not regret literally burning to ashes. After burning all the papers in his briefcase, and therefore effectively obliterating his past, the narrator makes it out of the dark underground world he had inhabited for what he says “might have been days, weeks; I lost all sense of time” (568).
Emerging into the world for what seemed the first time, the narrator had with him only his briefcase, the entire contents of which had been incinerated. He used his history to guide him out of the dark hole and out of illusion, finally emerging into the world without any reminders of his past to drag him down.
But one object remained in the briefcase. The shattered iron-cast bank from Mary was still in the narrator’s briefcase, and was the only object other than the briefcase itself which the narrator now owned. This bank, a derogatory and stereotypical representation of a black person, was something the narrator could not rid himself of despite trying multiple times to throw away the paper package containing the bank. The iron figurine signified his identity within the context of white America. As a black man, the narrator was a caricature, a non-human, with his Negro qualities played up and all others brushed over. The narrator cannot evade this inaccurate perception of him, and takes it with him even when starting his life over as Invisible Man. Even unseen and invisible to all around him, the stereotypes of African-Americans as perceived by white people persevered in the narrator’s interactions with others.
Throughout the novel, stereotypical roles are thrust on the narrator, simply because he is a black man. He is Mr. Norton’s chauffeur at the beginning of the novel, playing the classic role of a servile black man whose master is an affluent Caucasian. While a college student, the narrator is the prototype of the hard-working and mild Negro; much like Booker T. Washington, he toils industriously and without complaint at his duties. Later, he is thrust into the role of black spokesperson for the Brotherhood organization—he is pushed into the spotlight as the social activist “fighting for the rights of his people,” another stereotypical role white men often typecast their African brethren into both consciously and unconsciously. However, through these times when he is being used by the people around him, the narrator remains intelligently conscious of the way he is treated. He learns that because he is a black man living in New York City at that particular point in history, he can only expect to be held back by his social roles in his quest for discovery of his individual identity. Because of this, the narrator gradually slides into invisibility, allowing a mask to camouflage him from society.
Invisible Man is a bildungsroman, a novel that chronicles the moral and psychological development of a character, and therefore the thematic and narrative concerns revolve around these same issues. Because the novel is written in the first person, the consciousnesses of characters other than the protagonist are not deeply explored. Although the narrator is the character the reader learns most about, he remains only partially developed and hazily described. Many of the particulars—such as his name—are omitted from the story, perhaps because these facts were erased when the narrator lost his memory at Liberty Paints, or perhaps because Ellison did not want to divulge too much about his novel’s main character lest he lose universal appeal.
With the reader knowing as little about the narrator personally as he does, the narrator remains more of a symbol of all men in his similar plight than an individual personality. The universality of the novel’s appeal is greater because the protagonist is not described in fine detail, as a specimen, but instead is portrayed as a representation. The narrator is just one man. Almost any black man living in the hypocritical and racist American society in which the narrator lived could have told a similar story. The narrator has a powerful voice, and conveys through this voice the potent emotions he experiences as Invisible Man. The pain and reality of his situation are conveyed all the better because the reader does not know everything about him. Ellison does not share the narrator’s birth name, or the name he is given by Brother Jack, or the name of the college the narrator attends, or even the state in which the school is located. The reader knows only that the narrator came from the South, having attended a prestigious Negro state college. But no specifics are revealed to the reader, allowing the story of this one man to speak for all in similar situations because of the universality of his drama.
Everyone can identify with the struggle to find one’s individuality amid the hustle of so many other human beings just like oneself, all trying to stay afloat in a cutthroat and dangerous world. Because of its widespread appeal to human emotion, the story told by Invisible Man gained a diverse audience and a place in literary history. The novel was just one representation of a universal fight, battled by all oppressed peoples caught within the framework of societal prejudice all over the world and for hundreds and hundreds of years past. Invisible Man, in his struggle to find his unique personality amid a world of preconceived notions and pigeonholing ideals, touched on an issue experienced by many other people in all different walks of life—black, white, and all the races of the world. His fight was the fight of each man, and although many of his difficulties arose from the fact that he was African-American, Ellison intended the narrator of Invisible Man to be a universal character with universal appeal, and the popular acceptance of the novel is proof that he was successful in his aim.
