Ellison's accomplishment in Invisible Man

Ralph Ellison's great novel (1952) Invisible Man, takes his (unnamed narrator) into a college, obviously Tuskegee, circa 1935, where he is assigned to drive a white benefactor around for a day and the end up stopping, at the benefactor's request, to meet a vulgar, crude sharecropper and then, when the benefactor is literally overcome by this meeting - he has the ennobled ideas of helping the Negro Race, which he thinks of as the professors and students at the college, and he is appalled and horrified to meet this Southern agrarian black man and wonders if his ideals and ideas are wrong, perverted - narrator takes the white man to a whorehouse to try to get him a shot of whiskey. When the college prez, Dr. Bledso, learns of this he expels student from school, but provides him introductory letters to various trustees to supposedly help him get a job in NYC. Ok, we obviously can see around some of the edges of this narration - perhaps we are wiser readers, more used to bitterness and irony than were the readers of Ellison's day, but the story is still a great one. I mean, there's a very long scene at Tuskegee in which a black minister gives a sermon praising the college president as if he's the 2nd coming of the savior, and Ellison tells us only at the end of the sermon that the speaker is blind - we'd figured that out I think much sooner - so it's a pretty heavy-handed irony when, in next chapter, the sainted Dr. Beldso lashes out at the narrator and among other things calls him a "nigger." Similarly, we obviously sense that the sealed letters of introduction Dr. Bledso provides are poison-pen letters that will not help narrator get a job. And the first job he gets - irony or heavy-handed symbolism, take your pick - is in a paint-whitening factory, adding black pigment, which disappears within the paint bucket and thickens the mixture. All that said, the narrative just excellent, full of humor and insight and pathos - we really feel sorry for the Invisible Man, and not just as a person but also in the broader political sense, as a man and a race oppressed. The novel is about his journey not from innocence to experience but from hope and promise to withdrawal and bitterness, to his invisible life underground, "off the grid" we would say today ( he literally steals power from the grid, in fact). It's a very sad bildungsroman, and Ellison's accomplishment is in helping us to see this journey of education as not aberrant but as inevitable and obvious - a result of the political and racist forces at work in American, then and now.