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 the writer’s style.

The language is simple and straight forward. The author avoids the use of elevated English to depict the narrator’s level of education. The presence of the narrator in the novel engenders the use of the first-person narrative technique. The author is presented as limited in his knowledge of the actions of the other characters in the novel. The first-person narrative style gives pre-eminence to the thoughts and actions of the narrator above that of any other character in the novel. The tone prevalent in the novel ranges from hopelessness to optimism. When the narrator begins to grasp the reality of the brotherhood, the mood of the novel becomes melancholic. The entire novel is written using the past tense. Only the prologue and epilogue contain some statements written in the present tense.