In the Prologue to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the narrator explicates the novel's central metaphor by telling us that he is invisible because ''[white] people refuse to see [him].'' The narrator proceeds to illustrate this assertion with a story about a violent confrontation that took place between himself and a white man:

This passage offers a striking yet enigmatic vision of the nature of racial blindness. Seemingly explicit, the description nonetheless opens up layers of complicated questions about the differences between perception and projection, between action and reaction, in a racial encounter. From the narrator’s perspective, we see the white man’s ‘‘insolence’’ as anger from having to confront what he presumably did not want to see.