Causes and effects of invisibility and blindness in Ralph Ellison’s 'Invisible Man'

Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man is a bildungsroman, a type of novel that
chronicles a character’s moral and psychological growth. The narrator not only tells the story
of Invisible Man, he is also its principal character. The narrative and thematic concerns of the
story revolve around the development of the narrator as an individual. Additionally, because
the narrator relates the story in the first person, the text does not truly probe the consciousness
of any other figure in the story.
Ironically, though he dominates the novel, the narrator remains somewhat obscure to
the reader; most notably, he never reveals his name. The names that he is given in the hospital
and in the Brotherhood, the name of his college, even the state in which the college is located
all go unidentified. The narrator remains a voice and never emerges as an external and
quantifiable presence. This obscurity emphasizes his status as an “invisible man” as which he
introduces himself in the Prologue of the novel. He explains that his invisibility owes not to
some biochemical accident or supernatural cause but rather to the unwillingness of other
people to notice him as he is black. It is as though other people are sleepwalkers moving
through a dream in which he does not appear. The narrator says that his invisibility can serve
both as an advantage and as a constant aggravation. Being invisible sometimes makes him
doubt whether he really exists. He describes his anguished, aching need to make others
recognize him, and says he has found that such attempts rarely succeed. Now, the narrator
hibernates in his invisibility, preparing for his unnamed action. He states that the beginning of
his story is really the end.
The Prologue of Invisible Man introduces the major themes that define the rest of the
novel. The metaphors of invisibility and blindness allow for an examination of the effects of
racism on the victim and the perpetrator. Because the narrator is black, whites refuse to see
him as an actual, three-dimensional person; hence, he portrays himself as invisible and
describes them as blind. [...]