In the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, we can see that the narrator believes that he is invisible to everyone around him. When the narrator realizes that he is invisible, he decides to give up everything and hides underground with 1,369 lights that are wired all over his ceiling and is adding more little by little. As the narrator walks through the streets, he encounters a white man that is completely oblivious to the narrator and starts to cursing at him, before the narrator was going to really hurt the white man, he realizes that the white man didn’t see him. Once the narrator sees the helpless white man’s picture on the Daily News he laughs because the white man was “mugged” by an invisible man. “Without light I am not only invisible, but formless as well; and to be unaware of one’s form is to live a death.” (pg. 7) The narrator keeps adding lights to his home to feel visible because while being above ground walking around, he knows that he is invisible and just a shadow walking through the streets.
In Chapter 1 we get a glimpse of the narrators high school graduation and the outcome of his speech for his graduation ceremony. Since the narrators speech moved many people, some people decided to have the narrator give another speech to the community’s leading white citizens. At the end of his speech, the white men award him a briefcase and pretty much demands the narrator to cherish the briefcase because later it will help him determine the fate of his people. The white people also give him a scholarship to the state college for black youth. Although the narrator does receive these gifts, this is just the beginning to why the narrator ends up underground.

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