What We Leave Behind---on Chapter 1 Battle Royal of Invisible Man

What We Leave Behind---On Chapter 1 Battle Royal of Invisible Man In 1619, the first shipment of African slaves arrived in Virginia. Until the slave trade was abolished in 1807, a half-million Africans were brought to the United States as slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation signed by the President Abraham Lincoln and the Thirteenth Amendment passed by the Congress put an official end to the slavery system in the United States in the mid-19th century. During the following century, the burgeoning civil rights movement of African Americans led by Martin Luther King, Jr. established a historic landmark which promoted the social status of African Americans. As a matter of fact, the antiblack feelings still remain high and have been replaced from an explicit position to an implicit one where the racism is not consciously recognized. Therefore, I chose Chapter 1 Battle Royal of Invisible Man as a subject to review. This text produces an exceptionally effective display of the miserable treatment the African Americans received in the last century in the United States. The narrator, a nameless protagonist in this novel, considers himself invisible because people never see his true self beneath the roles which stereotype and racial prejudice compel him to play. Though he is talented with language, intelligent and deeply introspective. As we read among the lines that “All my life I had been looking for something and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was...But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man”, we easily realize the struggle of the narrator to arrive at a conception of his own identity. Ironically, in a racist American society, people only see him as they want to see him due to their racial prejudice or their limited ideology in a larger sense. Blindness or invisibility flows through the text as people willfully avoid seeing and confronting the truth. And prejudice against the black is not the only kind of blindness