Invisible man

The mood of the novel is surreal--dream-like and sometimes nightmarish. In fact, the dream serves as a motif that is echoed over and over in the novel. The narrator dreams that his scholarship to a black college is merely a note reading "keep this nigger boy running;" his unconscious seems to be telling him that his faith in the American Dream, as it applies to blacks, is naive and dangerous to his sanity. From that point on, every time the narrator seems to be on the verge of success--in college or in speech making or in organizations--he hears the echo of that dream. The novel functions in the way that a dream functions. It reveals what has been too painful to be faced, what has been repressed in the waking state.

The narrator is invisible because people see in him only what they want to see, not what he really is. Invisibility, in this meaning, has a strong sense of racial prejudice. White people often do not see black people as individual human beings. Another meaning of the theme of invisibility is the idea that it suggests separation from society. While the narrator is in his hole, he is invisible. He cannot be seen by society. He is invisible because he chooses to remain apart. Invisibility, in this meaning, is similar to hibernation, with the narrator’s choice to remain in his cave and think. This meaning of the theme doesn’t relate to me, but in a way, relates to the poet, Emily Dickinson, who wrote, “The Wind Tapped Like a Tired Man.” Dickinson withdrew from the world in her early twenties and became a recluse. It’s like Emily chose to be isolated from the rest of the world, just like the narrator in Invisible Man did. The third meaning is that invisibility indicates lack of self-hood. A person is invisible if he has no self, no identity. If a person doesn’t have a soul, spirit, personality, etc., then they seem like a ghost, a thing who is cold and invisible.

Invisible Man may be read as a story about the narrator’s development. It is a