Since we were assigned the last few pages of The Invisible Man, the storyline was pretty difficult to follow. After reading both the ending and the epilogue, I started to realize that the narrator was not actually invisible, rather he felt as though he was invisible due to his status in society. From my understanding of the excerpt, the narrator was a free, African-American man who was trying to escape from a few men, whether these men were real people or illusions I do not know. The narrator was experiencing internal conflicts about his role in society and his identity; he was frustrated and felt hopeless as he was trapped underground. Towards the end of the epilogue the narrator seems to achieve peace; he realizes that he is invisible but he is not blind.

From the little that I have read, it seems to me that Ellison is trying to portray the problem that many African-Americans faced during this time period and that problem is one about identity. Less than a century after the Civil War, African-Americans still faced discrimination and unequal access to certain facilities. This book was published in 1952, before Brown v. Board of Education, the Rosa Parks bus boycott, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous speeches, therefore it would make sense that African-Americans would feel as if they were second-class citizens and this could cause them to lose hope. This book really addresses an issue that was quite prevalent at the time and it allows readers to see the issue from the African-Americans’ perspective.