Why Does the Narrator Live in the Basement?

In the prologue of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, we're told by the narrator that he lives in a basement. And it's not an ordinary basement - it's his manhole which happens to be covered with 1,369 light bulbs and possibly more in the future. How he got here seems pretty straightforward - he just happens to fall into a hole in the ground during the riots happening in the city in Chapter 24. Obviously, you go down when you fall into something - you don't go up. But is there something more that Ellison is saying, by situating this reflection that the narrator has inside this basement with his light stolen from the power company. Why couldn't this period of reflection take place in a New York skyscraper or at a boarding house? Throughout the novel, Ellison seems to be telling us to look beneath the surface. He gives us plenty of opportunities to do this. Compared to Richard Wright's Native Son where everything seems to be happening on the surface level and Bigger Thomas barely has a developed conscience, Ellison does the exact opposite with Invisible Man - we have no clue where in the South the first bit of the novel takes place, we're not told anything about the narrator's family, and we don't even know his name. One's name is something that you're given from birth; when you introduce yourself, it's the first thing you say - "My name is [...]". In contrast, Wright tells us everything about Bigger Thomas - we know that he lives in Chicago, we even know where he lives in Chicago, we know he has a brother and a sister, and that he didn't go to school past the 8th grade. Irving Howe in his essay 'Black Boys and Native Sons' points this out - "... but with a book so rich in talk and drama it would be a shame to neglect the fascinating surface for the mere depths." (Howe) However, by eliminating specific things such as the Invisible Man's name or biographical details, Ellison gives so much in return - we're able to put ourselves in the body of the narrator, understand everything he thinks about, and at the end, we're prompted to ask ourselves a question - does the narrator speak for us? Ellison prompts us to go to our own figurative basement and tell us to introspect - are we blind like the Reverend Barbee? Do we keep running, without questioning the system through which we run? Are we invisible to others? Are others invisible to us? This brings me to the basement. The narrator spends the first few pages describing his invisibility and then says '"My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway." (Ellison, 6) Ok, so he has 1,369 light bulbs and his dark hole underground shines brighter than anything above. However, the narrator speaks of more than just the electromagnetic radiation that is light. He goes on to say, “I know; I have been boomeranged across my head so much that I now can see the darkness of lightness. And I love light. Perhaps you’ll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form “ (Ellison, 6) The narrator says that he can “see the darkness of light”. What does this mean? How can light still be darkness? Again, the narrator asks us to look beneath the surface. During the novel, we see the narrator explore the world outside the basement - he explores those shiny spaces in New York, like Broadway and Times Square. However, it’s in this basement where he realizes that there is still darkness and ignorance in all that light - no number of jumbotrons are going to make him visible; to others, he will always be a black man. However, he has to go down to the dark to see the light. And this light is only visible to him - no one can see it because they refuse to go underneath while the narrator feels almost stuffy due to all this light and illumination around him. This light represents truth and knowledge, the truth he has finally found in the lightness of the dark of the basement and no one down here can stop or manipulate him. As Ellison puts it, “Nothing, storm or flood, must get in the way of our need for light and ever more and brighter light. The truth is the light and the light is the truth.”