Ralph Ellison wrote Invisible Man in 1952, when the post-modern writing style dominated American literature. Post-modernism is displayed in this novel by several metaphors that literally and symbolically challenge Emersonian and Whitmanian models, which consider social equality for all beings in American culture. This democratic view of American society is contradicted by Ellison's use of tangible symbols, like the treatment that the doctors performed on the narrator in the Liberty Paint Factory, as well as the repeated use of the narrator's feelings of invisibility.
             The Invisible Man started working in the Liberty Paint Factory after he realized that Bledsoe's letters of recommendation warned employers not to hire him. While in the factory, the narrator was involved in an explosion that left him unconscious. Once he awakens, he hears men talking about the merits of their treatment, claming that their procedure's result, "is as complete a change of personality as you'll find in your famous fairy-tale cases of criminals transformed into amiable fellows after all that bloody business of a brain operation. And what's more, the patient is both physically and neurally whole." The operation was meant to completely erase the narrator's memory, and the doctors pronounced him cured when he could not remember his name or his mother's name; however, he eventually recovered his memory and proved the doctors' method unsuccessful. This treatment could represent the oppression of African Americans by powerful Whites at the time, symbolized by the white doctors' cruel procedure on an innocent African American. Furthermore, it could symbolize that many individuals thought, "society will suffer no traumata on his account," and therefore, improve if people like the narrator are eliminated. Lastly, the practice could signify that by erasing an African American's memory...