Mugged by a Phantom

As I was reading the chapter, I stumbled upon a peculiar exerpt from Ellison's Invisible Man (1952).  The story, found on page 108 of the text, caused me to read it a few times over because it was hard to wrap my head around.  It is about an African American man who feels like no one can see him, so much so that he feels invisible.  One night, he runs into a man who then calls him a name.  He got so angry that he started kicking the man and almost slit his throat.  However, in the middle of his rampage, he realizes that the man really didn't see him, he only was imagining him, so he left him bleeding in the street.  The next day, when the man sees the man he had run into in the news, he laughed because the man had been "mugged by an invisible man."  The following is a short exerpt from the story.

"Oh yes, I kicked him!  And in my outrage I got out my knife and prepared to slit his throat, right there beneath the lamplight in the deserted street, holding him by the collar with one hand, and opening the knife with my teeth-when it occurred to me that the man had not seen me, actually; that he, as far as he knew, was in the midst of a walking nightmare!  And I stopped the blade, slicing the air as I pushed him away, letting him fall back to the street.  I stared at him hard as the lights of a car stabbed through the darkness.  He lay there, moaning on the asphalt; a man almost killed by a phantom."

I had to reread this because it didn't make sense to me at first.  I realized that the man has felt invisible for so long that he almost doesn't believe that he really is real or that people are capable of seeing him. What was hard for me to grasp was that the man knew he himself was real because of what he did to the man and the fact that he saw him in the news the next day, and at the same time, the man he "mugged" probably really did see him and knew that a man had done it to him.  However, the man didn't believe that the man he mugged could comprehend that he wasn't a ghost or an imagination.  So he was real but he believed that he was not real to other people and acted upon that notion.  I guess it's really not that hard to comprehend, but the more I think about it and try to reason through his thoughts, the more confused I make myself. 

I guess what really matters is that he feels like he is invisible because no one gives him the time of day or cares about him.  He has lived alone without anyone noticing whether he is home or not home for so long that he believes that no one would be able to notice if he was missing or pick him out of a crowd.  It is a sad story because there are probably a lot of people who feel this way.  I don't think that it has to be specifically talking about an African American man in any certain time period because anyone who has no family, who lives alone, or who has no friends could be missed in this way and feel invisible.  I think it is a story with an overarching moral that shouldn't be ignored and has many implications for how we need to treat other people to help them feel "seen."