Prologue invisible man ralph ellison11/20/2023 I kicked him repeatedly, in a frenzy because he still uttered insults though his lips were frothy with blood.Īnd in my outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat, right there beneath the lamplight in the deserted street, holding him by the collar with one hand, and opening the knife with my teeth - when it occurred to me that the man had not seen me, actually that he, as far as he knew, was in the midst of a walking nightmare!Īnd I stopped the blade, slicing the air as I pushed him away, letting him fall back to the street. I pulled his chin down sharp upon the crown of my head, butting him as I had seen the West Indians do, and I felt his flesh tear and the blood gush out, and I yelled, “Apologize!īut he continued to curse and struggle, and I butted him again and again until he went down heavily, on his knees, profusely bleeding. He was a tall blond man, and as my face came close to his he looked insolently out of his blue eyes and cursed me, his breath hot in my face as he struggled. I sprang at him, seized his coat lapels and demanded that he apologize. One night I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps because of the near darkness he saw me and called me an insulting name. You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. It’s when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back.Īnd, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. You wonder whether you aren’t simply a phantom in other people’s minds. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. Then too, you’re constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact.Ī matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a bio-chemical accident to my epidermis. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination - indeed, everything and anything except me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. Incriminate, but that other person, if person, Not me you are grinning at, not me your confidential looks HARRY: I tell you, it is not me you are looking at, “you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?” “You are saved,” cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained
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