Invisible Oppression

The title The Invisible Man always causes thoughts of some science fiction thriller to rush through my head because the concept of invisibility is somewhat unknown to man. Sure, things can be camouflaged to appear invisible and they can hide from appearance by using things as cover, but true invisibility, and here I am talking about a condition when any seeing creature can look at you an see through you, has never been accomplished. Also, man is always afraid and extremely interested in the unknown, so I figured Ralph Ellison would take some weird approach on explaining invisibility through some obscure scientific concepts to satisfy his own interests. I was actually quite excited to read about something that could probably really spark my interest. The only problem was that I was completely wrong in my assumptions of the possible subject matter.
After reading through the first couple of pages in the novel, I realized that Ellison is going to explore a more figurative invisibility, but one that is just as interesting a topic, the inability of people to see the state of race relations. This topic is really only introduced a good ways into the novel when a fight breaks out between the people at the Golden Day saloon as one of the black veterans comments about a white man named Norton being blind to race relations. Despite the real discussion taking place in the meat of the novel, the introduction really struck me because of the fact that it is true, not the part about a man stealing electricity to light his home under a building but the part about how many are blind to the problems around them. In the case of civil rights, it took a man like Martin Luther King to come out and shed light upon an issue that many had chosen to turn a blind eye. In the case of the independence of many countries, such as India, it took a man like Gandhi to band the people together to strive for a goal that people had previously thought impossible or invisible. In the case of women’s rights, it took people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to band women under one banner to get the privileges they deserved. In all of these cases, the problems were apparent but remained invisible to the public until there was light shed upon the issue, light that could be taken as synonymous to the large amount of light present in the mans home. It is as if he is trying to fight his invisibility with an abundance of light so he becomes relevant again. This same light is shed upon Norton when he comes into the Golden Day saloon and witnesses the fight and hears the “doctor” talk to him about race relations. I will admit that I am a bit behind on my reading, but I can only guess how the rest of the novel will go as we learn more about the narrator’s invisibility and how he came to see himself in that way.