Something in this man's thick head had sprung out and beaten him within an inch of his life. I was like a drunken man myself, wavering about on weakened legs. He lay there, moaning on the asphalt a man almost killed by a phantom. I stared at him hard as the lights of a car stabbed through the darkness.
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 kicked him repeatedly, in a frenzy because he still uttered insults though his lips were frothy with blood. I pulled his chin down sharp upon the crown of my head, butting him as I had seen the West Indians do, and I felt his flesh tear and the blood gush out, and I yelled, "Apologize! Apologize!" But he continued to curse and struggle, and I butted him again and again until he went down heavily, on his knees, profusely bleeding. He was a tall blond man, and as my face came close to his he looked insolently out of his blue eyes and cursed me, his breath hot in my face as he struggled. I sprang at him, seized his coat lapels and demanded that he apologize. One night I accidentally bumped into a man, and perhaps because of the near darkness he saw me and called me an insulting name.
You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time. It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to bump people back. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist. Then too, you're constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often rather wearing on the nerves. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a bio-chemical accident to my epidermis. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination - indeed, everything and anything except me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. Retrieved from Ellison - Invisible Man v3_0.pdf
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