Invisible Man is a story of a black-American in the twentieth century who sought to be known 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.

DETAIL: Invisible Man is Ralph Ellison’s only novel and is widely acknowledged as one of the great novels of African-American literature. The invisibility of Ellison’s protagonist is about the invisibility of identity—above all, what it means to be a black man—and its various masks, confronting both personal experience and the force of social illusions. The novel’s special quality is its deft combination of existential inquiry into identity as such—what it means to be socially or racially invisible—with a more sociopolitical allegory of the history of the African-American experience in America. The first-person narrator remains nameless, retrospectively recounting his shifts through the surreal reality of surroundings and people from the racist South to the no less inhospitable world of New York City.

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.