comment on point of view

At the outset of Invisible Man, the unnamed hero is in transition. He has discovered that he is invisible and has retreated from the world in defiance; but the reader senses that all is not resolved.

In the adventure that the invisible man proceeds to relate in the first person ('T'), his voice changes over time from that of a naive young man, to someone who is clearly more responsible though still confused, to a person willing to deal with the world whatever the risks. The novel is framed by a Prologue and Epilogue. The story opens in the present, switches to flashback, and then returns to the present, but a step forward from the Prologue. Writing down the story has helped the hero to make up his mind about things. Leonard J. Deutsch attributes the complexity of the novel in part to this juxtaposition of perspectives of the "I" of the naive boy and the 'T' of the older, wiser narrator. Anthony West, on the other hand, writing in The New Yorker, called the Prologue and the Epilogue "intolerably arty ... the two worst pieces of writing in the work."