Invisible Man

Visibility and the Image of God

The narrator of Invisible Man is invisible not because he lacks physical substance but because the people around him refuse to see him. Their refusal is the refusal of the image of God: the denial that the person before them is fully human, fully made in the image of God, fully worthy of the attention that genuine human encounter requires. His invisibility is not his condition but theirs — the symptom of their blindness, not his insubstantiality.

TLA’s essay Image Bearers of Something Eternal reads Ellison alongside Wells, Matheson, Lewis, and Chesterton as one of the writers who renders, from the inside, the experience of having one’s image-bearing humanity denied. The narrator’s response — his descent into the underground, his illumination of it with 1,369 light bulbs, his preparation to emerge — is the response of a man who refuses to accept the denial as final.

What the Prologue Reveals

The novel’s prologue is set in the narrator’s underground room, where he has tapped into the electrical grid of Monopolated Light and Power and surrounded himself with light. “I love light,” he says. “Perhaps you’ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible.”

This is the precise theological logic of the image of God persisting in the face of its denial. The invisible man needs light because he is made in the image of the one who is light, and the darkness that has been imposed on him cannot extinguish that image, however completely it conceals it.

The Seed of the Woman

Genesis 3:15 describes a conflict in which the seed of the serpent’s most effective strategy is rendering the image of God invisible — convincing both the image-bearer and those around them that the image is not there. American racism has been one of the most systematic applications of this strategy in modern history.

Ellison’s narrator’s emergence from the underground is the seed of the woman pressing against this strategy: the insistence that the invisible man is visible, that the image is present, that the denial is a lie. “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” The lower frequencies are the frequencies on which the image of God broadcasts in every human being, visible or invisible. Ellison heard them and transmitted them, and TLA is among the stations receiving the signal.

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