To achieve Liberty Paints' Optic White color, the narrator “measured the glistening black drops, seeing them settle upon the surface and become blacker still, spreading suddenly out to the edges.” When the paint batch is mixed properly, the results are a glowing, bright white color. The symbolism in Liberty Paints' signature color represents the importance black individuals play in America's past, present and future. It's only when black is added to the paint mix that the purest, most ideal, paint color emerges. Ellison wants readers to question race and prejudice. Ellison is a master at painting the picture of racial blindness from this time period. He starts out the book with an unnamed character who is considered invisible “ simply because …show more content…
He concludes that he is invisible, in the sense that the world is filled with blind people who cannot or will not see his real nature. Early in the novel, the narrator’s grandfather explains his belief that in order to undermine and mock racism, blacks should exaggerate their servitude to whites. Probably the most important motif in Invisible Man is that of blindness, which recurs throughout the novel and generally represents how people willfully avoid seeing and confronting the truth. The narrator repeatedly notes that people’s inability to see what they wish not to see their inability to see that which their prejudice doesn’t allow them to see has forced him into a life of effective invisibility. Because he has decided that the world is full of blind men and who cannot see him, the narrator describes himself as an “invisible man.” The motif of invisibility pervades the novel, often manifesting itself hand in hand with the motif of blindness. The narrator travels to the bright lights and bustle of 1930s Harlem, where he looks unsuccessfully for