The narrator introduces himself from his underground home — 1,369 lightbulbs, stolen electricity, Louis Armstrong on the phonograph — and explains what it means to be invisible.

The narrator's graduation speech earns him a scholarship, but first he must endure the Battle Royal — a degrading spectacle in which young Black men fight blindfolded for coins on an electrified rug while white businessmen watch.

At the State College for Negroes, the narrator drives trustee Mr. Norton to two forbidden destinations — the Trueblood sharecropper's farm and the Golden Day veterans' asylum — and is expelled by Dr. Bledsoe for breaking the school's careful performance of racial order.

In New York, the narrator discovers Bledsoe's letters are frauds. After finding work at the Liberty Paints factory — whose famous Optic White requires black paint as its base — a boiler explosion lands him in a surreal hospital, where an electroshock 'treatment' scrambles his identity.

Mary Rambo, a Harlem landlady, takes in the convalescing narrator without payment and provides the novel's only uncomplicated warmth. In Harlem, the narrator witnesses an elderly couple's eviction, speaks spontaneously to a crowd, and is recruited by the Brotherhood.

The narrator becomes the Brotherhood's Harlem spokesman and thrives, his oratory drawing massive crowds. But tensions emerge: Brother Jack controls the message, senior Brothers resent his success, and he is warned about a charismatic rival named Ras the Exhorter.

The Brotherhood's star organizer Tod Clifton disappears, then is discovered selling Sambo dolls on a street corner. When a white policeman shoots Clifton dead, the narrator delivers a eulogy that inadvertently challenges Brotherhood authority.

Wearing sunglasses and a hat as a disguise, the narrator is mistaken for the mysterious Rinehart — simultaneously pimp, numbers runner, and storefront preacher. He learns the Brotherhood has deliberately allowed Harlem conditions to deteriorate. Ras prepares for open revolt.

Harlem erupts in a riot. Ras the Destroyer leads mounted warriors through burning streets. The narrator, attempting to confront Brotherhood leaders, falls through a manhole into the underground, where he burns his accumulated papers and begins to understand his true identity.

The narrator, still underground, reflects on his journey, rejects both pure cynicism and naive idealism, and announces his intention to emerge — to play his socially responsible role as a visible, if complicated, American.