Invisible Man

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1952

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Chapter 1

Chapters 2-6

Chapters 7-12

Chapters 13-16

Chapters 17-21

Chapter 22-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Introduction-Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction Summary

In the book’s nonfiction Introduction, Ellison reflects on the time he spent writing Invisible Man, which took him about seven years (from about 1945-1952). During most of that period, he lived in New York City’s largely African American Harlem and remarks that the irregular schedule he kept as he wrote made his neighbors suspicious of him, which amuses him.

Ellison was trying to write a different novel than Invisible Man, one that was set overseas during World War II. However, the “voice” of Invisible Man’s protagonist kept coming to him, and he finally abandoned his previous idea to write the novel. Ellison states that his goal in writing the novel was to explore where the narrative voice took him, as well as examining racial stereotypes to reinfuse them with the nuances the stereotypes are meant to strip away.

Prologue Summary

The African American protagonist relates that he is invisible—the concept is introduced somewhat literally—and that he has learned to adapt to his circumstances, creating a life for himself despite his invisibility. He shows forbearance toward people who don’t know that he’s there by restraining himself from doing violence to them. He also relates that he lives in the basement of an apartment building occupied by White people and that he is obsessed with light, wiring thousands of lightbulbs into the walls of his apartment. The protagonist reflects on his state of life and traces its origins back to 20 years earlier, in events related in Chapter 1.

Chapter 1 Summary

The protagonist relates that while his grandfather was on his deathbed, he condemned his own acquiescence with White oppression and called himself a traitor to his people. This troubled the adolescent protagonist, who was also skilled at comporting himself in a way that White people approved of.

Upon graduating high school, the protagonist delivered a speech that won him the praise of the school’s superintendent, and he was invited to give the speech again at a hotel reception. However, when he arrived, he and other young African American men were humiliated by being forced to box with each other while blindfolded, watch a White exotic dancer perform nude, and scramble to collect prize money thrown on an electrified carpet. The protagonist discovers later that the pieces that looked like gold coins were actually worthless brass advertising tokens.

After dismissing the other boxers, the White men told the protagonist to deliver his speech, which he did with difficulty. His mouth was bloodied and dry from the fighting, and the White men talked and laughed throughout his speech, taunting him and making him stop to define abstract terms. The protagonist uses the phrase “social equality” once, which draws the attention and ire of the White men, who associate it with African Americans’ desire for integration and racial equality. He finished the speech and was presented with a briefcase that had a certificate stating that he’d been awarded a scholarship to an African American college.

The protagonist relates a dream in which he attends a circus with his deceased grandfather, who tells him to open a briefcase like the one he was given. Inside are a series of envelopes, each representing one year of the protagonist’s life.

Introduction-Chapter 1 Analysis

The book’s Introduction exposes the reader to Ellison’s “true” voice (in that it is nonfiction rather than written from the perspective of Invisible Man’s protagonist). It also provides historical context for the work, because the Introduction in this edition was written almost 30 years after the novel was first published, and discusses the novel’s popularity and longstanding relevance during the 20th century.

The first chapter introduces many central themes of Invisible Man, particularly when it comes to race relations, and Ellison portrays a variety of humiliating circumstances that the young Black men at the hotel reception were forced to endure. The incident with the exotic dancer demonstrates that racist White men used sexual humiliation to make African Americans feel inferior and that their bodies are out of their control. The young men have involuntary sexual responses to seeing the woman’s naked body, responses that they didn’t seek out and would not have chosen to experience in such a public, hostile setting. In a similar vein, the coins in Chapter 1 that are the boys’ “reward” for their efforts are symbolic of the larger racial power structures of the time—the coins turn out to be worthless brass advertising tokens, just as the “rewards” promised by White people to Black people turn out to be useless in the protagonist’s experience. White women can also be oppressed and viewed as lesser by White men, as illustrated by their treatment of the exotic dancer in Chapter 1, which further underscores the power imbalances of the time.

The protagonist’s reflections on his grandparents, who were slaves, and his identification of the abolition of slavery occurring 85 years before places the “current” timeline in the late 1940s. The protagonist relates incidents that happened 20 years before that, placing the earlier timeline of the story in the late 1920s-early 1930s.