Invisible Man
An unnamed Black narrator recounts his journey from a Southern college through Harlem's political organizations to a basement where he lives surrounded by 1,369 light bulbs, tracing how American institutions, white liberal and Black nationalist alike, refused to see him as a person.
Summary
The narrator lives in a basement flooded with light. He has tapped into the city's power grid and installed 1,369 bulbs. The light is the first image of the novel and explains its organizing metaphor: he is invisible not because he is literally unseen but because others refuse to see him. The light is his assertion of existence against that refusal.
He then narrates how he got there. A series of institutions, each promising recognition and advancement, each ultimately requiring him to perform a function rather than be a person: the Southern college that expels him for showing a white trustee the wrong side of Black life, the paint factory that uses him as an emergency replacement worker, the Brotherhood (clearly the Communist Party) that deploys him as an organizer until he becomes politically inconvenient, and Ras the Exhorter's Black nationalism, which requires a different performance but is equally a costume.
In the battle royal sequence in the opening chapter, Black men fight blindfolded for the amusement of white businessmen, then scramble for coins on an electrified rug. Ellison spent seven years on the novel and chose to open it there.
The narrator, underground with his 1,369 bulbs, says he is preparing to emerge. Whether he will, and what emergence would mean, the novel refuses to answer.
Quotes
"I am an invisible man... I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."