The nameless, first-person narrator begins by suggesting that for the first twenty years of his life, he has looked to others to answer questions of selfdefinition. What he has discovered is that it is only he himself who can figure out who he is, but to do this, he must first "discover that [he] is an invisible man!" The story unfolds by narrating a scene in which those who are "blind" are not only the narrator, who literally wears a blindfold, but also those who abuse the narrator, sizing him up as mere stereotype, erasing his individuality and human dimension.

The narrator's question of self identity is not restricted to the mere twenty years of his own life but to the lives of his grandparents, who were born as slaves and freed eighty-five years before. This was a freedom that made them rhetorically part of a "United" States...