Invisible Man

The narrator's Harlem: a stretch of Lenox Avenue and 125th Street where he speaks for the Brotherhood, sees an old couple evicted onto the pavement, and is finally swept into a night of fire and looting. The arc runs from a Southern college and a downtown paint works into the heart of Harlem and down to the forgotten cellar where a man who feels unseen retreats underground.

The narrator

The Southern college

Chapters 1-6

Before New York, the narrator is a scholarship student at a Black college in the Deep South. A drive with a white trustee goes wrong, and he is expelled and sent north with letters that, he later learns, were written to keep him down. The campus echoes Tuskegee, the institute Ellison himself attended.

Chapters 1-6

inspired by The college is invented and never named, but its buildings, its founder and its ethos are drawn from Tuskegee in Alabama, where Ellison studied; this marks Tuskegee University. Set outsideSetting because it lies far from the book's Harlem map.

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