The Beginning of the Invisible Man’s End

There are two quotes in this Ellison novel Invisible Man, “I am an invisible man”, “the end is in the beginning”, and they begin and end the journey of the narrator’s. To start, in question is what does each quote represent? They’re meaning? How did the narrator come to this conclusion? As I examine these questions at hand I will state my hypothesis and create new questions as the process of these quotes as well as the novel is evaluated. The story of the Invisible Man took us through a journey of the narrator’s life experiences. Just as the narrator had questions and his own opinions I too will follow the same concept of questions and evaluations. Answers to questions are not crucial for this paper as much as exploring my personal theories and opinions to accept or reject my hypotheses. Let’s begin our analysis.

“The end is in the beginning” I feel it is only fair to concentrate on this to begin because, well, this is the beginning. When first introduced to this quote it happened to be the last sentence of the Invisible Man. I thought to myself, do I reread the prologue? As I literally pondered for an hour about a hypothesis I decided that it will deal with the narrator’s life “plunge outside of history”. Let me first discuss what I believe our newly stated quote “plunge outside of history” could mean. I view plunging as going down a drain and being sucked back up which also opens another thought; is this statement contradicting? How can you be plunged out of history if you make history every day? To keep it simple I will stick to the main concerns of this quote and it seems to me that the narrator could only get so far until he is plunged back to where he felt he always has been which would mean he could not make history, so this leads us back to the hypothesis statement. The meaning of, “the end is in the beginning”, is constructed around the quote “plunged outside of history”, he cannot make the history he wants before he is drawn back from his progress made....