h the direct, explanatory manner he used to explain the workings of the inner eye, the narrator seems to wander off into byways that have little to do with it. By the end, however, the problem of invisibility is one that is identified again as the responsibility of "all dreamers and sleepwalkers" whose inner eyes cannot see him and "even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all" (14). The narrator comes to identify himself, in his persistent blindness, as one of those culpable victims. His ramblings are then seen to constitute a concentrated account of the experience of, effects of, and responses to invisibility. They are, in short, a summary of the process in which the narrator has engaged and that has brought him to his present quandary; and they leave open the question of how to deal with the problem of invisibility.
In the Prologue the narrator speaks at a point in time following the completion of the action that makes up the body of the novel. The reader is constantly aware, therefore, of where the unnamed Invisible Man will end up. But the Prologue is meant as a starting point in two senses. First it introduces the narrator and his present situation and prepares the reader for the story of how he got there. It offers introductions to the various narrative modes--confessional, ironic, hallucinatory, straightforward accounts of events--and raises the possibility that his reliability as a narrator may vary. These disorienting shifts in style and tone prepare the reader for method of the novel.
The second respect in which the Prologue serves as a starting point is that it is written out of the narrator's desire to determine where he may be going from this point on. In telling the story of his life the Invisible Man is searching for clues to how he should proceed. The reader is, therefore, being asked to join him in looking for ways to go on--ways to create visibility out of invisibility. Ellison's st...