Many literary pieces often offer thoughtful reader lessons to retain and apply throughout their own lives. In Invisible Man by Ralph Waldo Ellison, racism and the struggle for racial equality are examined throughout the course of the novel. The narrator attempts to define himself and his true identity, yet time and again finds himself being limited by racial prejudice from the people around him. The brotherhood, the job at the Liberty Paints Plant, and the ideology of his grandfather and Dr. Bledsoe all increase the difficulty of the invisible man to find his true identity.
             At the beginning of the novel, the Invisible Man recounts the time when his grandfather was on his deathbed and told him that in order to achieve true racial equality he would need to show the white people that they were a good race and "agree 'em to death, let 'em swoller till they vomit or bust wide open" (pg. 16). The grandfather believed that if the black men were to act as if they agreed with the white man, then eventually they would just give up and give the black men their equal rights because they had achieved righteousness.
             Dr. Bledsoe's outlook was much in the same as the grandfather's. Bledsoe believed that as a black man in the South, you had to know how to deceive the white man. As Bledsoe reprimands the Invisible Man for taking Mr. Norton to the Golden Day, he implies that the black men in the South constantly should be lying to the white men. " 'You're black and living in the South-did, you forget how to lie?'...The dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie...I'm no white man. Tell me the truth!"(Pg. 139). Bledsoe actually doesn't believe the Invisible Man when he tells him that he made the decision out of his better judgment. Dr. Bledsoe and the Grandfather both believe that in order to overcome the stereotype of black men being stupid and undeserving of equal rights, you s...