Invisible Man Lesson Plan

Discuss the narrator's time at the hospital. What do you think was happening to him? What references were made to things that have actually happened historically?

Many students will have picked up the idea that as a charity case and a Black man, the narrator was subject to an experimental treatment without his consent. Some students might know of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, in which Black men were infected with syphilis without their knowledge or consent so that a white medical staff could study the progression of the disease; students should consider this thematic relationship. Some students may believe that the narrator is delusional, that the scenes in the hospital...