The narrator begins his story by recalling his high school graduation speech, which attracted the attention of the white school superintendent who invites him to give the same speech at a local hotel to the town's leading white citizens. Now in his 40s, he recalls a time when he was a naïve young man, eager to become a renowned educator and orator. In the Prologue, the narrator - speaking to us from his underground hideout in the basement (coal cellar) of a whites-only apartment building - reminisces about his life as an invisible man. during the pre-Civil Rights era when segregation laws barred black Americans from enjoying the same basic human rights as their white counterparts, the novel opens in the South (Greenwood, South Carolina), although the majority of the action takes place in the North (Harlem, New York). Told in the form of a first-person narrative, Invisible Man traces the nameless narrator's physical and psychological journey from blind ignorance to enlightened awareness - or, according to the author, "from Purpose to Passion to Perception" - through a series of flashbacks in the forms of dreams and memories. Invisible Man is the story of a young, college-educated black man struggling to survive and succeed in a racially divided society that refuses to see him as a human being.
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