Intro
Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is one of the most important novels in the American literary tradition. In the novel, an unnamed narrator (let's call him—you guessed it—"the invisible man") tells the story of his life, from his days at an African American college in the South to his migration to New York and Harlem, where he runs into all kinds of trouble. Let's zoom in on the opening passage of the book.
Quote
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.
Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a biochemical accident to my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.
Analysis
Remember what Du Bois said about double-consciousness? "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others." Think of it this way: if you're part of the majority, you don't have think about your skin color or your ethnic identity or anything like that. You're just you. If you're an ethnic minority, though, you know you're different because people treat you differently. You're torn.
What we have in the opening passage of Invisible Man is pretty much a dramatization of double-consciousness. The narrator refers to himself as an "invisible man," but, as he makes clear, he isn't actually invisible: it's just that white people don't see him. They don't seem him for who he is; they see him first and foremost as a black man.
The narrator's own perception of himself is divided. On the one hand, he totally sees himself as a full, complete human being. Sure, he's black, but that doesn't define who he is on all levels. On the other hand, he sees himself as white people see him: as an invisible man, as someone different from the majority of people around him.