Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man

The Invisible Man, written by Ralph Ellison, is a Bildungsroman novel that tells the story of a young African American man who struggles throughout his life trying to find his place in society, or to at least be acknowledged as the human being that he is. The narrator constantly questions his life labeling himself the invisible man. It addresses many of the social outcast issues African Americans had to face during the pre civil rights era. While the narrator of this story feels he is of non existence of those around him, the average immigrant living in the united states feels this same way. Nearly every immigrant goes unacknowledged, in the sense that people refuse to see them. For Example, many immigrants feel shunned in today's society, or in other

There's a lot of injustice going on simply because they were not born in the United states. Immigrants are still treated like grains of dirt, their opinions do not matter, any crime they commit, whether it be minor, turns into a gigantic controversial issue, as opposed to those of citizens who can get away with these things. In relation, in the novel the nameless narrator commits the crime of attacking a man, for bumping into him and calling him an insulting name, with punches and kicks, he does not do much damage but that is not how the white man saw it. “And I stopped the blade, slicing the air as I pushed him away, letting him fall back to the street. I stared at him hard as the lights of a car stabbed through the darkness. He lay there, moaning on the asphalt; a man almost killed by a phantom. It unnerved me.’’ (prologue 4) “The next day I saw his picture in the Daily News, beneath a caption stating that he had been "mugged." Poor fool, poor blind fool, I thought with sincere compassion, mugged by an invisible man!” (Prologue 4) Simply because the narrator is black he is accused of