Blindness

At the beginning of the novel, the Invisible Man describes how no one actually "sees" him. He says that it is not that he is not real, it is that "people refuse to see [him]" (3). This, however, is a play on words because by stating that people don't see "him", he means that they don't see his personality, his admirable qualities, his soul. They only see his outer shell, the color of his skin, and immediately judge him before really seeing him. Later on, he gives an example of how these people "of poor vision" push him around because they think that he is nothing (4). The Invisible Man shares the story of when he accidentally ran into a white man in the street, and before really seeing him, this white man calls him a derogatory name. This angers Ellison's character and he beats the man up demanding that the man apologize for what he said. Of course, the white man refuses and the Invisible Man takes out his knife to kill the man when he realizes that "the man had not seen [him]" so he decided that this man did not deserve to die because he was just ignorant (4). After this, he sees in the newspaper that the man said that he had been mugged. When he sees this, he calls this man a "poor blind fool" because it wasn't really a mugging, but because the man was "blind" and only saw the color of the Invisible Man's skin, he immediately assumed that Ellison's character was a criminal and that he had planned on attacking him. This is why the Invisible Man calls himself something that "sprung out of [the man's] thick head" because what society sees him as really only exists in the white man's mind because the real him is "invisible" because no one takes the time to see that side of him. He also knows that this side of him will never be shown because if he wakes "the sleeping ones", or the ignorant people who choose not to see him, it will be "dangerous" because when anyone tries to enlighten the ignorant ones, they are not ready to be mentally "woken up" and to see the real side of people, and they become aggressive and dangerous (5).