Theme Of Invisibility In Invisible Man By Ralph Ellison

The main protagonist of this novel is metaphorically invisible, everywhere he goes because he is black and it depicts his struggle to assert and prove himself visible. However, in the end, the hero of this novel realizes that his invisibility can be sometimes advantages to him and so he stopped complaining or protesting. "I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen" (Ellison). The protagonist is calmer and wiser after realizing and accepting the fact that all through his struggles throughout the novel, he has been invisible and unappreciated. Therefore it is true that invisibility is the key to self-discovery and freedom. "I am not only invisible but formless as ... well; and to be unaware of

In the novel Invisible man, the narrator represents the perfect example of "miseducated Negro", taught to despise his own people where he learned nothing about the numerous of black Americans and he has no concept of black history. In fact, the narrator would rather distance himself from uneducated Southern

The invisibility of our protagonist is completed when he disguised himself by donning a wide hat and dark glasses to avoid attack by those opposed to the Brotherhood. He was commonly mistaken to be known as Rinehart. Rinehart presents the narrator with the paradox of invisibility, the one who is visible is readily mistaken for the one who is not and never is in this narrative was the narrator made visible. "If dark glasses and a white hat could blot out my identity so quickly, who actually was who?" (Ellison 493). Thus it is true that since he made himself invisible and understand he is indeed invisible, he did escape those who wanted to kill him. By becoming invisible by wearing a disguise he freed himself from the hypocritical Brotherhood. At this point in the narrator's life, he understood that he is unseen by all and that he had been a fool by following others to prove his visibility when he should have accepted his own true identity. After dropping his disguise, he encounters Ras the Exhorter who wanted to hang the narrator. The narrator tried to argue but he realized at that moment, that he was invisible to them as well. "I stood there, knowing that by dying, that by being hanged by Ras on this street in this destructive night, I would perhaps move them one fraction of a bloody step closer to a definition of who they were and of what I was and had been. But the definition would have been too narrow; I