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Prejudice In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man

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Blindness is a common disability in the world but in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, it's the default. Not everyone is literally blind, but oblivious to their reality. The novel’s repeated vision motifs suggest that those who are blind willfully suppress the truth because of their station or prejudice and that only by unblinding themselves may one truly find who they are.

Bledsoe’s prejudice makes the narrator invisible to him. A prejudice is a preconceived opinion that's not based on fact, it's not specifically a positive or negative opinion. Bledsoe’s original prejudice towards the narrator is that he isn't very unique, he's simply one of the hundreds attending Bledsoe’s college. It's not until I.M, the narrator ends up introducing one of the college’s …show more content…

The narrator gets invited to Bledsoe’s office shortly after. Bledsoe begins to truly see the narrator as he explains the incident and his inability to deny Norton’s “order” to take him to the area’s slums. The narrator explains that he refused to lie to Norton and subsequently had no choice but to take him where he wanted. This angers and confuses Bledsoe because he’s already realized “that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie!”(139). He’s legitimately wondering why the narrator hasn't figured this out yet even asking him “what kind of education” he’s getting at the college. While this question is incredibly ironic as it's Bledsoe’s college it also reveals that Bledsoe is attempting to understand the narrator, to see him. Unfortunately, this moment of clarity doesn't last. He suspects the narrator was told to introduce Mr.Norton to Trueblood, that he was actively plotting against him. He begins to place the narrator in the same mental box as those he thinks drag “the entire race into the slime”(141). He went from viewing the narrator as an unremarkable student to someone who could jeopardize everything he’s achieved. associating I.M with

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