In Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," a sequence of memorable proceedings develops into a story about humiliation. The gathering in the ballroom was the start of a race against time, himself, and the darkness that white men wanted to keep his kind in. He pretends he is invisible as a coping mechanism to deal with horrid, embarrassing moments while he is dealing with devious people. He swallows his pride and does what the white men ask him to do. As the story unfolds, the narrator realizes that this was only a dream, but "It was a dream [he] was to remember and dream again for many years after"(2384). His grandfather had given him warning in the dream when he said, "Keep This Nigger-Boy Running"(2384). The young narrator did not fully understand the magnitude of this lesson yet. .
A fight takes place in a fancy hotel at the beginning of the story. This brawl is a representation of the Caucasian races desires to keep the African-American race in an apprehensive, bewildered state of mind. The whites act like tyrants and live their existence with explicit joy. This pleasure comes from making the blacks feel like second-class citizens. During the brawl, a white blindfold is used to cover the narrator's eyes. This cloth is symbolic of the whites feeling that they are superior to blacks and how easy it is to blindly lead them into humiliation. The obscurity scared the narrator because he really did not understand true darkness, that of the heart. .
The narrator's idea of being invisible is most apparent in his speech. Even when his embarrassment is at peak level, he continues to think of himself as invisible. The narrator was choking on his own blood but he believed "in the rightness of things"(2382). To further indicate the insincerity of these applicably corrupt people, they continued to yell loudly at the narrator as his mouth was "filling up with blood"(2382). He was so besieged that he uttered the wrong words when they kept telling him to repeat himself.