Invisible Man: Tone 1 key example

The tone of Invisible Man is cynical and critical. Throughout the course of the story, the unnamed narrator attaches himself to various institutions and groups which he believes will help him to make sense of the chaotic and irrational world around him. Invariably, he is let down as these institutions fail to live up to their promises, contributing to his pessimistic worldview. In the final chapter of the novel, he finds himself in a riot in Harlem, trapped between the police and the violent Ras the Destroyer, who calls for him to be hanged due to his affiliation with the Brotherhood, with which the narrator has also grown disillusioned. At this climactic moment, the narrator reflects wearily upon the events of his life and the limitations of the various parties competing for power: 

[They] wanted my death not for myself alone but for the chase I’d been on all my life; because of the way I’d run, been run, chased, operated, purged—although to a great extent I could have done nothing else, given their blindness (didn’t they tolerate both Rinehart and Bledsoe?) and my invisibility. And that I, a little black man with an assumed name should die because a big black man in his hatred and confusion over the nature of a reality that seemed controlled solely by white men whom I knew to be as blind as he, was just too much. 

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