I read this book when I was young, in my early twenties and I found the book bewildering. I had no frame of reference for the character’s struggle. By that time I had read about the struggles of black people but from the perspective and filter of white America. There was still something patronizing and belittling about white American grudging recognition of the virulent and long lasting racism inflicted on black people.
With this reading, I had a much easier time with the book. For one thing I related to his struggles of making it in the world, navigating around older, successful people. The novel doesn’t spend much time on the daily life of the main character although we learn enough about what his life looked like when he first got to Harlem. His life with the older, maternal figure Mary but once he becomes part of the Brotherhood, it is much more a clash of ideas and personalities.
His grandfather’s deathbed advice was to just grin and take it with white people. In other words accept invisibility as the price to pay for living in an America dominated by white supremacy. He finds out that it isn’t just white people who demand he be invisible. Even his college president, black landlady and the black men who work with the Brotherhood, the stand-in for the Communist party where he works.
He decides that the only way he can come to terms with his invisible status is to live underground and strip himself of all the notions that he can look to other people to make him visible. It is only when he confronts the rich, white Mr. Norton, a generous benefactor of the black college which the our nameless protagonist attended and then was kicked out of, does he embrace himself for who he is. In that moment as Mr. Norton scurries away from the scary, confrontational black youth, can our hero laugh and brush off the judgement of other people.
