Invisible Man | Summary

Prologue
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man chronicles the life of an unnamed, first-person narrator from his youth in the segregated American South of the 1920s to a temporary ‘‘hibernation,’’ twenty years later, in a ‘‘border area’’ of Harlem. From his ‘‘hole in the ground,’’ this invisible man responds to his ‘‘compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white’’ by telling his story. He begins by attempting to explain his own invisibility: ‘‘I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see...

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