Invisible Man - Themes

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the progress of the Black people. These are the days during which he is still a hopeful scholar, defining himself as a "potential Booker T. Washington." At this point he is living the life that others have told him that he should live, and defines himself as he believes he is seen through their eyes, as an icon of what a Black person can achieve when they put their minds to it, and as a role model for his people. The abuse and degradation which he is put through in the battle royal give him the first inklings that everything is not as it seems, but fail to do anything to change the narrator's perceptions of himself. It is quite possible that if given the chance, the narrator may have gone on living the life that society had preselected for him, and never realized his invisibility, but fate had other plans for him. His entire life was thrown into disarray the day that he was assigned around Mr. Norton, a powerful white man and founder of the school which he was attending. The ...

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beyond the hopeful traveler," in short, that all they will do is keep him chasing after a false hope. It is here that the narrator sees that his dreams of being the "next Booker T." will go unrealized, and that he may never return to the life which he has abandoned. This is also where he begins the journey to finding his true identity. Following a tip from the son of the seventh addressee, the same person who revealed the true contents of the letters, the narrator takes a job at a paint factory, but ends up caught in a furnace explosion on his first day. At the factory hospital, he is subjected to shock therapy and then released and given some compensation money from the company. ...

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