Invisible man-invisibility research

Invisibility by narrators definition- invisible by virtue of how others react to him. They do not accept his reality and thus live as though they do not see him. He gives a more direct example by explaining how he almost killed a white man whom he bumped into on the street. He continued to attack the white man as long as the man refused to apologize and kept insulting him. The narrator then realized that the man does not see him as an individual and the narrator walked away laughing at the thought that the man was almost killed by a "figment of his imagination".

The boys are blinded by a white blindfold which the narrator circumvents in order to approach the Battle Royal slightly less like an animal.  He had never truly experienced darkness before and it scared him. In this manner, his invisibility is again foreshadowed as the reader knows that he will fade as a character into more darkness as the novel progresses. During the speech men don’t even listen instead they laugh at him while he chokes on blood…. He then accidently says “social equality” instead of “social responsibility”. The audience becomes outraged and he swallows his blood and takes it back. He still doesn’t understand his grandfather because he can not spit out the blood and speak for himself. The boys’ literal blindfolding in the ring parallels the men’s metaphorical blindness as they watch the fight: the men view the boys not as individuals, but as inferior beings, as animals. The blindfolds also represent the boys’ own metaphorical blindness—their inability to see through the false masks of goodwill that barely conceal the men’s racist motives as they force the boys to conform to the racial stereotype of the black man as a violent, savage, oversexed beast. During the speech the narrator quotes Washington’s 1895 expo and realizes that being an upstanding citizen makes him even more invisible.

So we can understand Ellison's comment on invisibility mirrors that of characters such as Cauffield or Huck Finn who are unable to exist in the society so eventually they actually embody the one thing they are trying to escape... so the narrator shuts himself off from the modern world to make the final step to escape invisibility, he does this by letting no reaction happen to his actions and letting no influence take place in his life. He escapes the grid and figures out who he is for himself. Yet we notice that this is not heeding the grandfathers advice either... so he is directly obeying warnings given to him by someone who seems to understand the depth and scale of being invisible. He is then shown as an extremely sinister sort of being who rejects other beings and ends physically invisible.