Chapter Summary: Invisible Man By Ralph Ellison

Stuart MacIlwaine
General English 248
15 April 2015
Reading Response #3 In his novel, Invisible Man, author Ralph Ellison tells the story of an African American man who deals with the various hardships that come from being of color. Ellison implements the prologue in order to introduce various themes and ideas communicated through short stories told by the novel’s nameless narrator. Through the ideas of invisibility and vision, Ellison is successfully able to express racial themes in the prologue of his novel. The most prominent metaphorical aspect presented in the prologue has to do with the idea invisibility. The prologue begins with the narrator emphasizing to the readers that he is invisible, but not in a literal sense. It is not that people cannot see his physical body, but that they cannot see him for who he truly is. At first, it is not necessarily clear what the narrator actually means when he says that he is invisible, but, as the prologue progresses, it is made evident that he is referring to the fact that he is an African American. “That invisibility to which I refer occurs

After recalling the circumstances involving the dispute, the narrator claims that he decided not to slit the blond man’s throat because he had not actually “seen” the narrator. To the man’s knowledge, the whole situation was a part of a “bad dream.” By this, the narrator implies that the blond man was blinded by the dark color of his skin, and for that, he made unfair assumptions. “Then I was amused: Something in this man’s thick head had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life.” (Ellison, 5). The blond man hosted several inaccurate depictions of the narrator inside of his head, just because the narrator was black. As a result of the insult, the narrator actually became the monster that the blond man had falsely and initially assumed him to