Invisible Man Ralph Ellison Character Analysis

“Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison presents a main character who is invisible in the sense that people refuse to see him. It is not something physical about him, rather it is that people don’t seem to recognize his existence, even if they see him with their physical eyes. What I notice about the first chapter is that the main character, the invisible man, goes to great lengths to feel alive. Because he is invisible to other people he feels that perhaps he does not exist, or that he is dead. So the invisible man goes to extremes to to feel his aliveness. He fills his home with 1369 electric lightbulbs so that he can enjoy light. He powers these lights with power that he steals from the electric company, and he describes his theft of the power as a “battle” between him and the company.

The invisible man seems to have a more healthy approach to his situation. He finds outlets for his frustration: filling his home with light and music, waging a secret battle against the power company, even smoking a reefer. In the end the invisible man has a sense of self preservation. He knows that he is in a precarious, even dangerous situation, and he responds with care, deciding never again to take drugs so that he can avoid being “run down with an orange and yellow street car, or a bilious bus.” In contrast to this fairly healthy approach I see a more self destructive attitude from Dostoevsky’s narrator. At the start of the passage the narrator tells readers that he is sick and that he refuses to let doctors treat him “out of wickedness”. Just from the narrator’s description of himself it is obvious that he has not learned how to deal with cognitive dissonance in a healthy manner, and perhaps never will. Rather than finding healthy outlets such as light and music he embraces what he hates and forces himself to enjoy things that he knows make him despicable both to himself and