Invisible Man

In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison mixes the conventions of various genres. The novel is generally identified as a modernist novel due to its experimental style, including various dream-like or hallucinatory scenes and a tendency to jump forward and backward in time in a nonlinear fashion. Additionally, The Invisible Man contains strong elements of social criticism and political satire, offering caricatures, or satirical sketches, of various political groups and ideologies that were prominent in the New York City of the mid-20th century. Primarily, however, the novel is a bildungsroman, or a novel of education that follows the intellectual and moral growth of its protagonist. In the first chapter, the narrator describes his upbringing, highlighting what he considers to be his earlier naïveté: 

All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man! 

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