Invisible Man is a story of a black-American in the twentieth century who sought to be known as successful and well acclaimed but had to learn through diverse experiences of his invisibility as a black person in a white dominated society.

At the beginning of the novel, the narrator (who remains nameless through the story) emphasizes his invisibility.

He notes that his invisibility is a result of people’s inability to see him take or take note of him.

In reality, he is not invisible; he admits that he has been hiding from the rest of the world by living underground.

He also has been stealing electricity from the monopolized Light and Power Company.

The narrator learns that in the United States of America, a person’s skin colored played a vital role in social mobility, especially mobility on the social ladder.

In the American society where the narrator lives as a black person, he is expected to defer at all times to the whims and caprices of whites.

At different stages in the narration, the author shows how the black person is humiliated by whites who want to show that blacks are inferior to them.

The novel is mainly focused on the ill-treatment of the blacks that lived in the twentieth century America.

An unnamed narrator speaks, telling his reader that he is an “invisible man.” The narrator explains that he is invisible simply because others refuse to see him. He goes on to say that he lives underground, siphoning electricity away from Monopolized Light & Power Company by lining his apartment with light bulbs. The narrator listens to jazz and recounts a vision he had while he listened to Louis Armstrong, traveling back into the history of slavery.

The narrator flashes back to his own youth, remembering his naïveté. The narrator is a talented young man, and is invited to give his high school graduation speech in front of a group of prominent white local leaders. At the meeting, the narrator is asked to join a humiliating boxing match, a battle royal, with some other black students. Next, the boys are forced to grab for their payment on an electrified carpet. Afterward, the narrator gives his speech while swallowing blood. The local leaders reward the narrator with a brief-case and a scholarship to the state’s black college.

While Invisible Man bears comparison with the existentialist novels of Sartre and Camus, it also maps out the story of one man’s identity against the struggles of collective self-definition. This takes the narrator-protagonist through the circumscribed social possibilities afforded to African-Americans, from enslaved grandparents through southern education, to models associated with Booker T. Washington, through to the full range of Harlem politics. Ellison’s almost sociological clarity in the way he shows his central character working through these possibilities is skillfully worked into a novel about particular people, events, and situations, from the nightmare world of the ironically named Liberty Paints to the Marxist-Leninist machinations of the Brotherhood. In the process, Ellison offers sympathetic but severe critiques of the ideological resources of black culture, such as religion and music.