Plan ralph Ellison's Biography Summary of Invisible Man

My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt if there's a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine." (Prologue)
He explains that his invisibility gives him an outsider's perspective on the social realities of the US, and that the events of his life have led him to realize that instead of trying to "be someone" in the outside world, he should pause and "illuminate the blackness of [his] invisibility" by escaping American reality and writing his story (Prologue).
The University
The body of the novel begins in the narrator's small Southern town after his high school graduation. Proud of the success he has made in public speaking and on the debate team, he is haunted by the death-bed words of his grandfather, a freed slave, who told him "our life is a war, and I had been a traitor all my born days" (Chapter One). Not knowing what this means, the narrator keeps his grandfather's words close throughout the novel. He attends a formal event for which he has prepared a speech. He learns that in order to win a scholarship to an all-Black university, he must fight in a humiliating battle royale for the entertainment of the community's rich white elite.
The narrator soon attends a fictional all-Black university, based on the Tuskegee Institute founded by Booker T. Washington. In the novel, the narrator's university and its founder are all thinly-veiled references to Tuskegee, even down to the statue of the Founder next to a young slave.

Do you want to see this and many more great infographics?

SIGN UP NOW FOR FREE
Statue of Booker T. Washington, "Lifting the Veil of Ignorance" by Charles Keck at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. Ellison attended Tuskegee and included this statue in his fictional college in Invisible Man. Wikimedia Commons.
I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters...above the face of a kneeling slave; and I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding." (Chapter 2)
Ellison is critical of his experiences at Tuskegee, suggesting that it functioned more as a way to maintain class boundaries in the Black community than to educate and empower the community itself.
In his junior year, the narrator is given the task by the president of the university, Dr. Bledsoe, to chaperone one of the white trustees, named Mr. Norton, around the nearby neighborhoods of the university. Mr. Norton tells the narrator that he believes his own "destiny" is tied together with the destiny of the Black population. Emerson asks the narrator to see the log cabin of the town outcast, Jim Trueblood, and the narrator reluctantly agrees, though he knows that a conversation with Trueblood will be a disaster.
Trueblood's story of how he impregnated his own daughter leaves Mr. Norton sick. He asks the narrator to take him to get a drink of alcohol, but the only bar nearby is the Golden Day––an infamously rowdy tavern located near an insane asylum. At the Golden Day, the narrator and a group of people from the asylum tend to Mr. Norton, but while there a Black veterinarian reveals his disdain for rich, white men like Mr. Norton.