Invisible Man

Alongside the metaphor of invisibility that gives the novel its name, the narrator also uses sleep as a metaphor for describing those individuals, often white, who ignore him, rendering him “invisible.” He alternatively describes these people, metaphorically, as being asleep, as dreaming, or as sleepwalking. In the prologue, for example, he elaborates upon these various “sleep” metaphors: 

Most of the time (although I do not choose as I once did to deny the violence of my days by ignoring it) I am not so overtly violent. I remember that I am invisible and walk softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones. Sometimes it is best not to awaken them; there are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers. I learned in time though that it is possible to carry on a fight against them without their realizing it.

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In describing the “hole” in which he lives after being chased by members of various political factions in New York, the narrator uses both simile and metaphor: 

Now don’t jump to the conclusion that because I call my home a “hole” it is damp and cold like a grave; there are cold holes and warm holes. Mine is a warm hole. And remember, a bear retires to his hole for the winter and lives until spring; then he comes strolling out like the Easter chick breaking from its shell. I say all this to assure you that it is incorrect to assume that, because I’m invisible and live in a hole, I am dead. I am neither dead nor in a state of suspended animation.

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The title of Invisible Man is drawn from the metaphor of invisibility explored at various points in the novel. Reflecting upon his status as a Black man in America, whose interactions with others are structured by racialized stereotypes and inequalities, the narrator comes to feel that he is practically invisible, unseen by others. In the prologue, he expands upon this metaphor: 

Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a biochemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. Then too, you’re constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision.

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In a deeply ironic passage that is dense with allusions and metaphors, the narrator describes a sermon at the college chapel, which is attended by the school’s wealthy white donors: 

Here upon this stage the black rite of Horatio Alger was performed to God’s own acting script, with millionaires come down to portray themselves; not merely acting out the myth of their goodness, and wealth and success and power and benevolence and authority in cardboard masks, but themselves, these virtues concretely! Not the wafer and the wine, but the flesh and the blood, vibrant and alive, and vibrant even when stooped, ancient and withered. (And who, in face of this, would not believe? Could even doubt?)

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After the narrator inadvertently exposes Mr. Norton, a wealthy white trustee of the college, to danger and injury, he meets with the college president, Dr. Bledsoe, who is infuriated by what he considers to be poor judgment by the narrator. When Bledsoe threatens him with expulsion, the narrator retorts that Bledsoe promised Norton that he would not punish the narrator. Bledsoe, however, laughs off this threat. In his cynical response, he compares his own life, metaphorically, to a game: 

“I don’t even insist that it was worth it, but now I’m here and I mean to stay—after you win the game, you take the prize and you keep it, protect it; there’s nothing else to do.” He shrugged. “A man gets old winning his place, son. So you go ahead, go tell your story; match your truth against my truth, because what I’ve said is truth, the broader truth. Test it, try it out … When I started out I was a young fellow …”

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After being the victim of sabotage by the paranoid and hostile factory foreman Lucius Brockway, the narrator wakes up in a hazy state in a bizarre hospital-like environment, where he observes medical personnel hovering above him through a glass surface. In his description of this surreal scene, he uses a series of similes and metaphors related to water. 

Faces hovered above me like inscrutable fish peering myopically through a glass aquarium wall. I saw them suspended motionless above me, then two floating off, first their heads, then the tips of their finlike fingers, moving dreamily from the top of the case. A thoroughly mysterious coming and going, like the surging of torpid tides. I watched the two make furious movements with their mouths. I didn’t understand. They tried again, the meaning still escaping me [...] 

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After being fired from the Liberty Paints factory after just one day of work and becoming disillusioned with his life in New York City, the narrator uses a series of metaphors related to heat and ice in order to express his volatile feelings at this point in the novel: 

Somewhere beneath the load of the emotion-freezing ice which my life had conditioned my brain to produce, a spot of black anger glowed and threw off a hot red light of such intensity that had Lord Kelvin known of its existence, he would have had to revise his measurements. A remote explosion had occurred somewhere [...] and it had caused the ice cap to melt and shift the slightest bit. But that bit, that fraction, was irrevocable. Coming to New York had perhaps been an unconscious attempt to keep the old freezing unit going, but it hadn’t worked [...]

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At first, the narrator feels personally satisfied with his work as an organizer for the Brotherhood, as he both believes in their mission and is pleased by his successes. In his description of his early days working with the Brotherhood, the narrator uses a series of metaphors, hyperboles, and allusions: 

The Brotherhood was a world within a world and I was determined to discover all its secrets and to advance as far as I could. I saw no limits, it was the one organization in the whole country in which I could reach the very top and I meant to get there. Even if it meant climbing a mountain of words. For now I had begun to believe [...] that there was a magic in spoken words. Sometimes I sat watching the watery play of light upon Douglass’ portrait, thinking how magical it was that he had talked his way from slavery to a government ministry [...] 

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After finding himself in a dangerous position, trapped in the midst of a riot between the police and the homicidal Ras the Destroyer, the narrator escapes and overhears a group of men joking about Ras’s eccentric behavior. Reflecting on recent events, the narrator uses a series of paradoxes and a metaphor: 

They were laughing outside the hedge and leaving and I lay in a cramp, wanting to laugh and yet knowing that Ras was not funny, or not only funny, but dangerous as well, wrong but justified, crazy and yet coldly sane … Why did they make it seem funny, only funny? I thought. And yet knowing that it was. It was funny and dangerous and sad. Jack had seen it, or had stumbled upon it and used it to prepare a sacrifice. And I had been used as a tool.

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