“I am an invisible man.”

This is the opening line of Ralph Ellison’s hit novel, Invisible Man. Upon its publication in 1952, it became an instant success, winning multiple awards the following year and establishing Ellison as a key twentieth-century literary figure.

Ellison wrote Invisible Man shortly after the conclusion of the Harlem Renaissance (1918-1937), a movement in the United States in which African Americans across innumerous artistic disciplines collectively produced works of art inspired by Afrocentric pride and identity. It was a period of cultural revolution, of discovering and redefining what it meant to be an African American in the modern United States. Ellison composed Invisible Man in a similar revolutionary vein, as a bildungsroman (coming-of-age story) that deals with self-discovery despite the obstacles of societal constraints.

In the introduction to the 1980 edition, Ellison explains the novel was inspired by a fledgling story he’d started writing in 1945, which was about an African American pilot shot down over enemy lines during World War II. When captured and taken to a Nazi prisoner-of-war-camp, the pilot discovered he held the highest military rank, yet, at the same time, the lowest social standing. Through the story, Ellison intended to depict the absurdity of democratic ideals when manifested in the case of a high-ranking individual, skilled in a challenging and respectable career field, yet still considered a second-class citizen because of race. As Ellison labored over creating the story of his pilot, he found that another story was taking shape beyond it—one about a young African American’s quest for identity and self-definition in a world determined to control and define him after its own socially-constructed patterns.

Invisible Man opens with the sardonic voice of a nameless protagonist who has spent years underground recovering from the emotional, psychological, and physical turmoil he’d endured while trying to fit into American society. The society that had burned and berated him, used him, kept him running on an endless hamster wheel of unmet expectations, and never once acknowledged him as a unique and important soul. Further in the opening, he says, “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.”

With Louis Armstrong’s blues spinning on a record in the background, the speaker tells the story of his efforts to fit himself into a world of black and white definitions, of dos and don’ts, and of rights and wrongs in terms of socio-cultural rules. Yet it becomes apparent that in striving to become what everyone wants him to be, the speaker’s own sense of self diminishes and disappears. No one sees him—that is, he is invisible—because what people see in him is nothing but their own projections of what they presume to see. Even he can’t view himself without their opinions blurring his vision.

Thus, the speaker’s statement, “I am an invisible man,” serves to preface every interaction he has with the characters in the story, all of whom have standards and expectations for how he should behave. After defining himself by others’ strict black and white, absolutist rules throughout the majority of the novel, he later discovers that his personhood, and the world at large, consists not only of innumerous shades of grey, but also of unimaginable colors and lights and unique distinctions. By the end of the story, he determines that he was never intended to fit into the confines of a personhood constructed for him by a factitious social order. And because of this awareness, his invisibility is then able to transform into something beautiful—a blank slate that he can fill however he chooses. Freedom to define himself in his own way.