Invisible Man

            
             "With things going so well I distributed my letters in the mornings, and saw the city during the afternoons. Walking about the streets, sitting on subways beside whites, eating with them in the same cafeterias (although I avoided their tables) gave me the eerie, out-of-focus sensation of a dream I was unsure of how I should act. For the first time, as I swung along the streets, I thought consciously of how I had conducted myself at home. I hadn't worried too much about whites as people. Some were friendly and some were not, and you tried not to offend either. But here they all seemed impersonal; and yet when most impersonal they startled me by being polite, by begging my pardon after brushing against me in a crowd - .
             Through out the entire novel Invisible Man everything seems to be related to a battle or comparison of black and white. In the beginning instructions about how to live in a white man's world are given to him by his grandfather. These instructions become a puzzle that he attempts to solve for the rest of his life. On one hand, he accepts his grandfather's explanation as just being insane. However on the other hand he is constantly troubled by its meaning of "yessing- the whites to death. Invisible Man is a story of a Negro's journey from, from South to North, province to city, and his faith in changing. .
             The beginning is both nightmare and an interesting struggle. A shy quiet Negro boy comes to a white smoker in a Southern town he is to be awarded with a scholarship. Him and several other Negro boys are rushed to the front of a ballroom, where a blonde stripper tempts and at the same time frightens them by dancing in the nude. The Negro boys now blindfolded stage a "battle royal," which is a free-for-all where they beat each other to the drunken shouts of the whites. Practical jokes, humiliations, and terror ended by the narrator delivering a prepared speech of gratitude to the whites.