Ralph Ellison, in his autobiographical Invisible Man, uses a first-person narrator, a man who is looking back on his earlier years. This gives the reader two characters in one, so to speak--the younger man undergoing his painful but liberating education in life, and the older man reporting and reflecting on the experiences of his younger self. In telling his story this way, the older narrator can more formidably shape his reporting and commentary (whether in the body of the work itself or in the sections which bookend the work) in order to critique the American society which would harbor the terrible racism which the younger man experiences and which still exists as the older man writes. Ellison's first-person chronological narrative is clear and straightforward and presents the growth and development of his character, with an emphasis upon his awakening to the harsh realities of racism and upon his determination to remain strong and determined to be a free individual in the face of such racism, neither bending to it nor becoming equally a racist himself.
The narrator addresses the reader directly in the opening and closing sections, the prologue and epilogue. In the body of the work Ellison shows concretely why he has come to the conclusions he shares at the beginning and the end of the book. The objective views of the opening and closing sections are meant to support and be supported by the harsh evidence of his actual life as a young black man in white-controlled Amer
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