Notice the Invisible Title? We began the reading of Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. The story is about black people and their invisibility within society. The narrator, nameless for the time being, uses sarcasm and personal experiences to portray to the reader his opinion about how black people are treated. The narrator accepts his own invisibility, saying that he "remembers he is invisible and walks softly so as not to awaken the sleeping ones." (5) This silent acceptance gives the reader the impression of a superiority feeling coming from the narrator, as he sees himself as someone who is awake in a world where humans live asleep. Even though he is "walking softly," the narrator explains that he does it because he is in hibernation. This, he defines as being "a covert preparation for a more overt action." (13) This can be considered foreshadowing, warning the reader that the silent acceptance won't be happening for long. The narrator is gathering the information that he needs to be able to take action.

Ellison also uses paradox to describe the narrator's feelings about having to take action. Listening to a song by Louis Armstrong that inspires him to act for his race, the narrator says "it was a strangely satisfying experience for an invisible man to hear the silence of sound." (13) You can't hear silence, and and sound can't be silent. But this song spoke to the narrator, being a silence that he could relate to.

When later the narrator tells the story of the battle royal, Ellison uses strong imagery to describe the scenes taking place. Ellison says "his muscles twitching like the flesh of a horse stung by many flies." (27) Comparing the narrator's pain to that of a horse, Ellison shows how they are lowered to the status of animals by making them fight each other barbarically. The people sitting around them watching the show regard the blacks as a source of amusement, worth the same as any other animal.

While the narrator is giving his graduation speech in front of the inattentive audience, nothing interests them until he mistakenly mentions social equality. Faking that the audience saw him as a human, the truth came out when the narrator talked of his equality to them. He is forced to say that he "wasn't being smart." (31) The silence and almost fear that came from the white audience after the mention of a possible equality proves others' denial to accept the humanity of blacks.

Ellison's diction is interesting, as he chooses to include the dialect of the people to show how they talked down to blacks. "Leggo, nigger! Leggo!" (28) is how the white sitting in a chair responds to the narrator's plead of help when threatened with the electrifying rug during the battle royal. There is no compassion in his words, that give the feeling that the suffering black man is anything but visible to him. The man chose to ignore him, just like the "sleeping ones" choose to see blacks as invisible men.