Living within the city, you are able to see many homeless people. After a while, a person loses his or her individuality and becomes just another homeless person. Without a name or source of identification, every person would look the same. Ignoring that man sitting on the sidewalk and acting as if we had not seen him is the same as pretending that he did not exist. Invisibility is what the main character of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man called it when others would not recognize or acknowledge him as a person.
We first see that the main character is an anxious college student who only wishes to please his superiors and do as they ask. The invisible man has an incident thay occurs with a College Board member and involves the passive use of our narrator's invisibility, which enraged the school's principal. The disagreement that followed included this statement " Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it you know it" which is stated by the school's Principal Dr. Bledsoe (Ellison 143). In the beginning of this quote it is Bledsoe's idea of invisibility and what the narrator will eventually learn which is that having power and invisibility can coincide with each other. This discussion with Bledsoe opens the narrator's eyes to the real world and shows that being right doesn't mean you have power and without power you are nobody and remain invisible.
In this novel the man character describes his invisibility by saying, "I am invisible simply because people refuse to see me." He later explains that he is "neither dead nor in a state of suspended animation," but rather is "in a state of hibernation." (p.6) This invisibility is something that the narrator has come to accept and even embrace, saying that he "did not become alive until he discovered his invisibility." (p.7) However, as we read on in the story, it is apparent that the invisibility that the narrator experiences, goes much further than just white people unwilling to acknowledge him for who he is.
