The Role Of Segregation In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

The novel Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison speaks of an unnamed narrator who is ‘invisible’ to the world around him because people fail to acknowledge his presence. The novel came out in the 1950’s and follows the long adventurous journey of a black man from the South to the North trying to impress many people to become a ‘visible’ man, to make an identity in the world but is thwarted down by his skin color. The constant let down because of the narrators different skin color lead the narrator to believe that in order to become known in the society, a man should become ‘invisible’. The novel addressed the social, the psychic, the metaphysical and the radical components of racism during the 1940s and the 1950s. This was the time period where African Americans were fighting for their rights and the novel conveys the

The issues that were prevalent in the novel about black stereotype and white superiority during the 1940s are not as prevalent to the lives of African Americans now. Segregation, racism, and organizations such as the Brotherhood are the issues in the novel which have improved in today’s time. Firstly, the issue that was quite prevalent in the novel was segregation. Segregation is when there is a separation amongst human beings on the daily basis based on their racial or ethnic differences. In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison creates the narrator’s world where blacks seem white, up is down, and insanity is sanity. During the narrator’s journey from the South to the North, he meets many situations where segregation is depicted strongly. When the narrator is leaving the South on the bus, he finds the vet and an attendant in the back of the bus and he “look[s] around for a seat around them, but although the bus was almost empty, only the rear was reserved for [them] and there was nothing to do but move back with them” (Ellison 151). This scenario from the