The idea of "invisibility" is key to the novel Invisible Man, which comes as no shock to anyone who actually read the book (or read the title). However, we are never presented with a concrete definition of what "invisibility" truly means. We know that certain characters are described to have it, such as the narrator, Dr. Bledso, Brockway, and Rinehart to list a few. While we get somewhat of a description of the invisibility of each of these characters, I believe that the Rinehart sequence gives us the most insight into what invisibility really means.
The narrator describes himself as invisible in the prologue and gives quite a lot of information on the foundation of invisibility. He says that, "I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see 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. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me," (Ellison, 1). He establishes that this invisibility is something figurative and says that he is invisible because "people refuse to see him." This is our first clue as to what this invisibility is. He describes invisibility as something that prevents people from recognizing who he is and projecting his surroundings onto him.
The next major example of invisibility is Dr. Bledso. The difference between the invisibility of the prologue narrator and Dr. Bledso seems quite vast, but they appear to fundamentally the same thing. The narrator describes Bledso's invisibility in the terms of his manipulation of others. This is similar to the idea that no one sees his true self and instead they can only project his surroundings on him, but the difference is that he utilizes this and manipulates people with it. However, we have yet to get a real grasp of what it means to not "see someone" and "project their surroundings on them."
The Rinehart sequence is where all of this is finally cleared up. This entire sequence comes off as somewhat of a fever dream, as a priest being a pimp seems awfully unrealistic. However, this doesn't matter in the grand scheme of the story, because the takeaway from this dream is the way his invisibility is portrayed. Everyone knows his name is Rinehart, but they all associate a different identity onto him based on their previous interactions with him - their surroundings, to some extent. I believe this sequence right here shows exactly what invisibility is: everyone associating an identity with who you are, but never truly seeing the full picture. The real Rinehart was all of those things, but no individual person knew that. He was invisible to all of them.
My view on the concept of invisibility changed throughout the novel, and it's really interesting seeing your perspective as shown through the Rinehart scenes. I definitely think there's some overarching societal messages about how we don't truly see one another or something like that. In terms of the narrator, though, I think he feels like nobody truly understands him. We never see anyone grasping all the different events and traumas he's experienced, and I don't think even the narrator fully processes it until he's writing it all down (like in the introduction).
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