Themes

THEMES
The following are major themes of Invisible Man.
1. INVISIBILITY
The most inherent theme to begin with is that of invisibility. What is an infrared man? How is the kind of invisibility Ellison writes about different from the physical invisibility of the English author H. G. Wells famous book The Invisible Man? A culture of Ellisons novel suggests that the theme of invisibility has different dimensions: (a) Invisibility suggests the involuntariness of others to see the individual as a person. The fabricator is unseeable because people see in him only what they want to see, non what he really is. Invisibility, in this thought, has a strong sense of racial prejudice. White people often do not see black people as individual human beings beings. (b) Invisibility suggests separation from society. While the narrator is in his hole, he is invisible. He cannot be seen by society. He is invisible because he chooses to remain apart. Invisibility, in this sense, is associated with hibernation, with the narrators conscious choice to remain in his cave and think. (c) Invisibility suggests lack of self-hood. A person is invisible if he has no self, no identity. This leads you to the second theme.
2. THE SEARCH FOR IDENTITY
Who am I?



This phrase echoes through the novel, especially in Chapters 12 and 23, those crucial sequences where the narrator struggles most openly with the problem of identity. The narrator has no bulge out to. At various points in the novel he is given pieces of paper by individuals or groups. These pieces of paper name him, identify him as having some role: student, patient, member of the Brotherhood. soon enough none of these names is really his. The narrator cannot be named until he has a self, a self that is not defined by outside groups and organizations. The story of Invisible Man, then, might be exposit as the narrators taking on and discarding a whole serial publication of false identities, each one bringing him a circumstantial closer to a true sense of self.
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