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.
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