Prologue to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

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 Armstron

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e approached each fresh alternative with fervor and hope. But he was motivated only by the aching desire the invisible may feel "to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world" and, as a result, he has "been boomeranged across [his] head so much that [he] can now see the lightness of darkness" (4, 6). Unlike the usual novel of a young man's education in which the character learns gradually from his experiences, the narrator persists in refusing to learn. This brings him to the strange situation in which he now reviews his life and, as he has come to understand invisibility, he can investigate his experience in terms of lightness and darkness, black and white, blindness and sight--the keys to understanding invisibility and seeing what he missed the first time around. The narrator begins with a sense of purpose that he never really loses--even if his goals change. As he tells Peter Wheatstraw when the old man says that people are always making plans and changing them, "Yes, that's right, but that's a mistake. You have to stick to the plan" (175). His only response is to remark seriously on how young the narrator is. Older men are often able to see the mistakes that the narrator is making, but he is usually scornfu

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