This post will discuss the Plot Summary of Invisible Man By Ralph Ellison.
The book starts with the Narrator telling his story by claiming that they are an “invisible man.” His invisibility, he claims, is not due to physical limitations–he does not actually disappear but is instead the result of his inability to allow others to be seen by them. The Narrator claims that due to his invisibility, he has been hiding from society, living in a cave, and taking electricity at the Monopolated Light & Power Company. He has burned 1,369 light bulbs in a single session and listens to the music of Louis Armstrong’s “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” on a Phonograph. He says he’s gone underground to tell the tale of his life and to hide from the world.
As a young man in the latter part of the 1920s or the early 1930s, the Narrator was a resident of the South. Because of his gift as a public speaker, he’s asked to deliver a speech to a group of prominent white people in his town. They give him the gift of a briefcase with the scholarship to a top Black college but only after humiliating him by requiring him to participate in a “battle royal” in which he will be pitted against younger Black men, blindfolded in a boxing arena. After the battle royal, white males force the young men to scurry across an electric rug to grab fake golds. The Narrator dreams that night, where he in imagines that his scholarship is a small piece of paper with a simple command to run.
Three years later, the Narrator has become a student at the school. He is tasked with driving the wealthiest white administrator of the school Mr. Norton, around the campus. Norton is constantly talking about his daughter and then takes an uninhibited interest in the story that tells the story of Jim Trueblood, an uneducated and poor black man who got his daughter pregnant. After hearing about this incident, Norton needs a drink, and the Narrator brings him to Golden Day, a saloon and brothel that typically serves Black men. There is a fight among a group of mentally unstable Black veterans who are at the bar, and Norton is able to escape during the chaos. He is taken care of by one of them, that claims to be a physician and mocks Norton along with the other Narrator about their ignorance of race relations.
On the campus, the Narrator is listening to an impassioned, long sermon delivered by Reverend Homer A. Barbee on the topic of the college’s founder who blind Barbee praises with poetic words. After the sermon, the Narrator gets dissuaded by the president of the college Dr. Bledsoe, who has been informed of the Narrator’s mishaps with Norton in the old slave quarters as well as the Golden Day. Bledsoe criticizes the Narrator telling him that he should have presented the white man with an idealized picture of Black life. The Narrator is expelled with seven letters of recommendation to the college’s trustees, who are white in New York City, and takes him to the city to look for employment.
The Narrator is transported to the bustle and bright lights of 1930s Harlem and is unable to secure a job. The letters given to him offer little help. Finally, the Narrator is summoned to an office belonging to one of the addresses, which is one of the trustees known as Mr. Emerson. Emerson’s son is there who reads the letter and informs the person who wrote it that he was betrayed.
The letters from Bledsoe show the Narrator as dishonest and untrustworthy. The young Emerson assists the Narrator in securing a job with a low salary for Liberty Paints. Liberty Paints plant, whose most popular shade has been named “Optic White.” The Narrator works as an employee of Lucius Brockway, the Black man who creates the white paint. However, Brockway suspects that he is involved in union activities and then turns against the Narrator. Both men fight, ignoring the process of making paint; as a result, one of the unsupervised tanks explodes, and the Narrator is unconscious.