But prejudice against others is not the only kind of blindness in the book.

The narrator not only tells the story of Invisible Man, he is also its principal character.

The narrative and thematic concerns of the story revolve around the development of the narrator as an individual.

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 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.

The narrator remains a voice and never emerges as an external and quantifiable presence.

This obscurity emphasizes his status as an invisible man as which he introduces himself in the Prologue of the novel.

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.

It is as though other people are sleepwalkers moving through a dream in which he does not appear.

The narrator says that his invisibility can serve both as an advantage and as a constant aggravation.

He describes his anguished, aching need to make others recognize him, and says he has found that such attempts rarely succeed.

Now, the narrator hibernates in his invisibility, preparing for his unnamed action.

He states that the beginning of his story is really the end.

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.

In his essay Ellisons Masks and the Novel of Reality, Schaub talks about exclusive reality that is present in the novel.

According to him, the narrator has been excluded from reality or may only participate in it on the condition that he remain invisible (130).

The motif of invisibility pervades the novel, often manifesting itself hand in hand with the motif of blindness: one person becomes invisible because another is blind.

It can bring disempowerment, but it can also bring freedom and mobility.

Indeed, it is the freedom the narrator derives from his anonymity that enables him to tell his story.

The narrator demonstrates this power in the Prologue, when he literally draws upon electrical power from his hiding place underground; the electric company is aware of its losses but cannot locate their source.

It recurs throughout the novel and generally represents how people willfully avoid seeing and confronting the truth.

The narrator repeatedly notes that peoples inability to see what they wish not to see their inability to see that which their prejudice does not allow them to see has forced him into a life of effective invisibility.

Invisible Man Full Text