Instead of the scholarship, the briefcase contains a note that reads, 'Keep This Nigger Boy Running.' The dream sets the stage. That night, the narrator's dead grandfather - a former slave - appears in a dream, ordering him to open the briefcase and look inside. At the end of his speech - despite his degrading and humiliating ordeal - the narrator proudly accepts his prize: a calfskin briefcase containing a scholarship to the state college for Negroes. Then the narrator - now bruised and bleeding - is finally allowed to give his speech in front of the drunken white men who largely ignore him until he accidentally uses the phrase 'social equality' instead of 'social responsibility' to describe the role of blacks in America. The boxing match is followed by a humiliating event: The boys must scramble for what appear to be gold coins on an electrified rug (but, which turn out to be only worthless brass tokens). The entertainment also includes a sensuous dance by a naked blonde woman, and the boys are forced to watch. But when he arrives at the hotel, the narrator is forced to participate in a brutal blindfolded boxing match (the 'battle royal') with nine of his classmates, an event, which, he discovers, is part of the evening's entertainment for the 'smoker' (a kind of stag party). The narrator begins his story by recalling his high school graduation speech, which attracted the attention of the white school superintendent who invites him to give the same speech at a local hotel to the town's leading white citizens. Now in his 40s, he recalls a time when he was a naïve young man, eager to become a renowned educator and orator. In the Prologue, the narrator - speaking to us from his underground hideout in the basement (coal cellar) of a whites-only apartment building - reminisces about his life as an invisible man.

during the pre-Civil Rights era when segregation laws barred black Americans from enjoying the same basic human rights as their white counterparts, the novel opens in the South (Greenwood, South Carolina), although the majority of the action takes place in the North (Harlem, New York). Told in the form of a first-person narrative, Invisible Man traces the nameless narrator's physical and psychological journey from blind ignorance to enlightened awareness - or, according to the author, 'from Purpose to Passion to Perception' - through a series of flashbacks in the forms of dreams and memories. Invisible Man is the story of a young, college-educated black man struggling to survive and succeed in a racially divided society that refuses to see him as a human being.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison