Why is Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man invisible? All the better for us to see ourselves in him. Ellison's 1952 novel Invisible Man and the title character of this work are designed to help us understand the different ways in which people are socially visible and invisible, about how society grants power to some while shrouding others in political and cultural invisibility. The book follows the travails of its narrator, a young black man whose name we never learn, as he proceeds from one social milieu to another, in every case being met with intolerance, with racism, with cultural narrowness. He is in some fundamental way invisible to everyone he meets because they cannot see him in the same way that they see themselves. He is not human to them. And yet, Ellison's invisible man struggles onward, never admitting defeat, still hopeful that he can through his own efforts force people to see him as a real man rather than as some cipher, rather than simply as a reflection of their own limitations.
The narrator's of the novel is never under the illusion that people see him as fully human: He is always aware of the gap between the way he sees himself and the way that others see him. The novel's psychological tension is based not on his coming to realize this fact but rather on his refusal to accept this differential. It is difficult not to read this novel as being in no small part autobiographical, for the narrator's experience of being invisible as a black man must have been drawn from Ellison's own experiences of being a black man in the United States during those often grim decades between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era. This novel - which Ellison wrote in his mid-thirties, a time in life in which many people are becoming increasingly aware of the limitations that the world is determined to place upon them - contains within it elements of pride as well as anger, despair along with hope for the future of a nation still so divided ...