The personal and institutional conflicts within Invisible Man can largely be viewed as fights to retain power and control.

When Dr. Bledsdoe expels the narrator, it isn’t because he has caused any tangible harm. It’s because he has been involved in something Bledsdoe finds disreputable, which threatens the school’s standing and, by extension, Bledsdoe’s own station in life. As he and the narrator argue about the impending consequences of the incident, he tells the narrator outright that he will betray as many other Black people as he needs to in order to retain his own power.

When Brother Tod Clifton is killed, the narrator is left to contemplate who will be the one to record his friend’s place in history. Realizing that it will always be the one with power, the narrator is upset to think that Clifton will be immortalized as a one-dimensional criminal instead of a whole, complicated, contradictory person simply because the power imbalance between him and the police is so vast.

The power struggles within the Brotherhood, too, ultimately foreshadow the power struggles of the world at large. In the story’s final chapters, the narrator realizes that the violence in the streets is an intentional unwitting community sacrifice instigated by the Brotherhood to consolidate their own power by allowing their enemies to destroy themselves.

By choosing to exempt himself from the perceivable world at the novel’s end, the narrator both cedes and gains power. He loses the power of bureaucracy, failing to exist in the outside world and thus unable to ask anything from it outright. And yet, he also gains power—the power to live undetected in the margins, taking what he wants from the world without being seen.