The Prologue to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man introduces the narrator and sets up the novel's principal themes. But the reader cannot grasp them easily since the Prologue is also filled with ambiguous, confusing material: the layers of music that the narrator hears while he is high; the references to characters we have not met; the narrator's strangely violent behavior; and the mystery of why he is in this cellar. He comes across like a madman, who also has some lucid thoughts mixed in with his rambling, and it is only by the end of the Prologue--which may require two or three readings--that the reader detects its unity. By the end of the Prologue one concept emerges with clarity and that is the problem of invisibility. His invisibility is the result of the peculiarities of vision of the people with whom he comes in contact. It is, however, "a matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality" (3). The narrator, it turns out, has his own problem with his inner eyes and he comes to see that he has been blinded to the truth that the experience of previous generations could have revealed to him. The heart of this idea is his response to the music of Louis Armstrong in the Prologue. Armstrong was an older black man from the South--something he has in common with those the narrator persistently ignores, or cannot truly see, throughout the novel. By the time of the Prologue he understands that Armstrong had "made poetry out of being invisible" and as he slips into his hallucinatory experience of the recording, like Dante descending to Hell, the narrator seeks illumination in the darkness below (8). His memories too are now part of the collective memory that he will draw on to find an answer to the problem of invisibility.
This seems clear enough, but the subsequent ambiguity of the text of the Prologue seems to confuse the issue. Rather than continuing wit...