Plan ralph Ellison's Biography Summary of Invisible Man

Summary of Invisible Man
Published in 1952, Invisible Man became a well-known work of art and was often cited by readers throughout the 1950s and 60s as one of the greatest American novels of the century. With this novel, Ellison brought Black literature to a mainstream audience. For much of the white literary establishment, Invisible Man was the first novel about the Black experience they had read.

The cover of Invisible Man was created by the American artist E. McKnight Kauffer who also designed the dust jackets of Ernest Hemmingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) and Richard Wright's Native Son (1940). Wikimedia.

Invisible Man is a frame tale, where the Prologue and Epilogue are told in the novel's present, while the rest of the novel is told in retrospect, looking back at events that had happened.
A frame tale (also called a frame story) is a literary device in which a story is told within another story. One narrative "frames" or encompasses the other. Popular examples of frame tales are One Thousand and One Nights and The Princess Bride, and Invisible Man.
Invisible Man is made up of three major sections. The Prologue and Epilogue are the frame (The first and third major sections), and take place years after the events of the body of the novel. The novel's body (the second major section) is divided into 25 chapters which we have broken into four major parts: the University, Liberty Paints, the Brotherhood, and the Harlem Riots.
We have broken the novel into these four parts and named them based on the "institutions" that the narrator joins. This has been done by many novel critics to better explain and summarize the events of the novel.
Prologue
The most famous part of Invisible Man is the opening Prologue, which begins with the oft-quoted line:
I am an invisible man...I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." (Prologue)
The Prologue is the first half of the frame tale, where the narrator lives in a bunker: "I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century" (Prologue). The narrator proclaims he is in a state of hibernation after all of the events of his life have led him to distrust the outside world. As an act of "sabotage," the narrator has wired his bunker with 1,369 lights, powered by siphoning electricity from the company Monopolted Light & Power.