Ellison implies that if racists really saw their victims, they would not act the way they do. The narrator recognizes his invisibility slowly—in moments like the hospital machine, when he realizes he is being asked to respond to the question of who he is in terms of his blackness.
What does the invisible man represent?
It addresses many of the social and intellectual issues faced by African Americans in the early twentieth century, including black nationalism, the relationship between black identity and Marxism, and the reformist racial policies of Booker T. Washington, as well as issues of individuality and personal identity.
How is the invisible man invisible Ralph Ellison?
SUMMARY: The narrator of Invisible Man is a nameless young black man who moves in a 20th-century United States where reality is surreal and who can survive only through pretense. Because the people he encounters "see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination," he is effectively invisible.
Is the man in Invisible Man actually invisible?
Because the narrator is black, whites refuse to see him as an actual, three-dimensional person; hence, he portrays himself as invisible and describes them as blind.