Invisible Man

Intending to see Brother Hambro right away, the protagonist leaves the Brotherhood headquarters, finding the streets a chaotic turmoil of various groups agitating and holding rallies in response to Clifton’s death. Ras the Exhorter is among them, and he spots the protagonist in the crowd, calling him out in front of the rally-goers for the Brotherhood’s failure to adequately address or avenge Clifton’s shooting. The protagonist defends himself and the Brotherhood and then moves on, but some of Ras’s men follow him and try to beat him up. The protagonist decides to disguise himself to avoid further conflict and buys sunglasses and a hat to conceal his identity.

Wearing these items, people consistently confuse him with a strange man named Rinehart, and the protagonist takes advantage of this, going into a bar and having an argument with a Brotherhood member who doesn’t recognize him in the disguise. The protagonist walks through the city and is disgusted by the poor treatment of the Black community at the hands of the White men who view Black people as anonymous, standardized “numbers” rather than individual people. He decides to follow his grandfather’s advice of undermining White people while appearing to be cooperative on the surface, and decides to enlist the help of a woman connected to the Brotherhood organization who he can use to attack the leaders who have committed such injustices. 

The night after he decides to work against the Brotherhood, the protagonist reconnects with one of the member’s wives, a White woman named Sybil. She has previously shown sexual interest in the protagonist, and he decides to seduce her to try and get information that will help him undermine the organization. She comes to his apartment the following night and the two drink heavily. The protagonist‘s interest in her as an informant is waning when she drunkenly tells him she has had a long-standing sexual fantasy of being raped by a Black man. The protagonist is determined not to enact the fantasy and keeps her drinking until she passes out, after which she believes that he has “raped” her.

The protagonist receives a phone call telling him to get up to Harlem where riots have broken out. He helps Sybil get a cab home, then makes his way to Harlem. Even as he enters the borough, he can tell that unrest and chaos are taking place.

Still drunk from his seduction attempt with Sybil, the protagonist finds himself in a chaotic scene of police shooting at civilians in the streets and people looting stores. It becomes clear that this rioting is in response to Clifton’s death. The protagonist is clipped by a bullet and falls in with a gang of men that fill buckets with flammable fuel and go to their tenement building to burn it down. They evacuate the building of its occupants and douse the rooms with the fuel, setting it on fire and then getting out. A woman recognizes the protagonist and calls him by his Brotherhood title, and he overhears someone say that Ras is looking for him. The protagonist slips away and is horrified by the chaos and the brutality he sees around him. He realizes that the Brotherhood has encouraged the looting and rioting, and sent him up there to be the “face” of the looting for the police and people.

Eventually the protagonist ducks into a quieter street, only to find Ras leading a mob, looking for arms to battle the police. Ras calls for the protagonist to be hung, and the protagonist tries to explain that such brutality would confirm the narrative that the White leaders of the Brotherhood have created. In desperation when he realizes that he can’t convince Ras, he throws back a spear that Ras has thrown at him and spears him in the mouth. This creates a disruption that lets him escape. The protagonist intends to go back to Mary’s to seek refuge, but he’s pursued by a group of men asking what’s in his briefcase. While running away from them, he falls through an open manhole into a coal heap below the street. The men drag the cover back over the manhole, and the protagonist spends an indeterminable length of time down there, having a dream in which all his antagonists appear and blind him. He realizes that his imprisonment underground is the last disruption that finally shakes off the last vestiges of his old self. 

The protagonist reflects on the journey he has undertaken, the isolation he continues to live in, and determines to emerge to continue the fight for social justice for Black people. While the text doesn’t state explicitly that he eventually got out of the underground coal heap, it seems likely that he does based on the book’s earlier chapters and the improbability of him surviving underground in a literal sense. However, the protagonist’s psychological invisibility continues even after he emerges physically from the manhole—a condition he seems determined either to use to his advantage or to change in the future.