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Invisible Man Book Notes Summary

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by Ralph Ellison
About 36 pages (10,886 words)
Invisible Man Summary

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Objects/Places

Hole: The narrator lives in a hole to hide himself from the rest of the world because he's not sure whether or not he's real because he feels invisible.

Leather Briefcase: The narrator is awarded the leather briefcase by the white men at the club where he is humiliated along with several other black boys. He keeps the briefcase with him because it makes him look important.

Golden Day: The Golden Day is a brothel and bar where black people congregate. The narrator takes Mr. Norton to this place when the old man is sick and then he is expelled because he exposed the white man to the seedier side of black folks by showing him the Golden Day.

Letters of Recommendation: Dr. Bledsoe writes letters of recommendation for the narrator under the guise that he can use them to find a job in New York so that he can earn tuition to come back to school. What the narrator doesn't know is that the letters of recommendation are really letters warning potential employers against hiring the young man.

Liberty Paints: Liberty Paints is the company that he goes to work for after he finds out that Bledsoe's letters of recommendation are fake. While he's at Liberty Paints where he works for a day, he is in an accident that lands him in the factory hospital where they experiment on him without his permission.

Brotherhood: The Brotherhood is the Communist party led by Brother Jack and several other men.

Dancing paper Sambo dolls: Clifton sells these dolls just before the cop shoots him, and the narrator keeps the doll in his pocket. He is disgusted by the degradation that the dolls promote, but he holds on to it because he can't figure out why Clifton would make or sell those things.

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