Ellison's Invisible Man presents the theme of the individual activist quest for spiritual freedom in a [pure,] abstract form…. Ellison's narrative does not compromise with its theme: there are no resolutions in love. The invisible man, the Southern Negro narrator, elects to call himself only "invisible man." This anonymous Negro thrusts again and again, in a series of episodes, parallel and repetitive more than sequential and developing, against the walls of his environment. That he does not prevail against the environment does not lessen the dramatically-perceived nature of his quest: the search for an authentic identity beyond the labels the world would give him. Frustration is everywhere, and he finds the group with which he most identifies, the Negro group, most susceptible to the world's labels for it, most confined, and most self-defeating in its pursuing of group purposes.

In electing to be an invisible man, the narrator elects to be free of all labels, white or Negro, for himself; he elects to lose his group identity and to live alone, alienated and free. The choice of invisibility (by living underground) as freedom is the end-choice, after the above-ground struggles of the novel…. The Prologue and the Epilogue of the book deal with the idea of invisibility, giving a surreal context and emphasis to many of the realistically described scenes inside the main narrative. Ironically, anonymous is what the Negro is in a white society: by electing this condition for himself, as a defense against white society's labels for him, which he has found set him and his brothers against one another, he makes the only free choice which remains available to him. Living underground in a hole, full of light from 1,369 lights lit by voltage stolen from the Monopolated Light and Power Company, and full of sound …, he feels he truly lives at last. "I myself, after existing some twenty years did not become alive until I discovered my invisibility," he says.

The invisible man is both the victim hero trapped in an absurd world and the activist hero. In the Epilogue to the novel, he says, "All life seen from the hole of invisibility is absurd," and he has experienced throughout his adventures above ground a cruel victimization from the absurdities, black and white, of the world. Yet he has acted; he has sought himself and finally found himself in the ironic recognition of his own invisibility. (pp. 188-89)

In an essay, "Black Boys and Native Sons," Irving Howe has attacked … Ellison for having deserted what he considers to be the authentic tradition of Negro writing, the social protest novel best characterized by the work of Richard Wright. One of his complaints against Ellison is his making the narrator-hero of Invisible Man speak of his life as one of "infinite possibilities" at the time that he is living in a hole in the ground. Ellison, in answering Howe's essay, accuses Howe of having missed the irony in this. Not only does Howe, a social literary critic, miss the irony, it seems to me he also missed the specific evasion of social considerations in the quest for personal and spiritual freedom proposed here by a Negro writer whose concept of his own novel is that

it's a novel about innocence and human error, a struggle through illusion to reality…. Before he could have some voice in his own destiny he had to discard [all his] old identities and illusions; his enlightenment couldn't come until then….

The hole is twofold: the ultimate trap and the freely chosen place where he may burn the old papers and roles behind him before going to his next activist phase above ground.

While the main theme is uncompromisingly one of identity and freedom in Invisible Man, Ellison, like [James Baldwin in his Another Country], finds it necessary to invoke love. Ellison, however, does not culminate his hero's quest in the conclusive and resolved terms which love, as the final truth, gives to Another Country; he rather sees that the freedom of a Negro person may evaporate in hate, and love becomes necessary to supply a balance that enables progress toward freedom of the self. (pp. 190-91)