Invisible Man...WTF

I can see why Invisible Man is the perfect to use on any AP lit free response ...it is absolutely ambiguous! As I was reading the book I picked up on so many allusions, symbols, etc. From researching Gestalt theory, the three blind mice story, and black nationalism I am still not completely sure of the central "so what?" of the book.. First of all,I cannot choose if the narrator should be considered an antagonist or protagonist. Is this a story about an unfortunate life or redemption. Is the narrator a vicinity of society or just himself. What makes answering these questions so hard is because amid them is the band rip of the polarizing social amps ogre that pervades the entire text. I often wondered while reading it if I could negate the issue of race relations in the understanding of the text but honestly I am not sure. I believe that the narrator's concept of him being an invisible man is due to being a black man. We see at the beginning of the text that he starts off in an underground space where he lives the. E tells the story. At the epilogue we find out that he is back on this hole of a home. Obviously this is symbolic because EVERYTHING in this book has some meaning we just have to find it. But at the same time I feel like the text is referencing race just as much as it is referencing knowledge, power, consciousness, and gender issues. Either way, it is not as surface as just race I know that. The book would have been so much easier to read if that had been the case. Instead I have a chaotic image of fire, riots, and a man retreating back into a weird under ground quarter leaving me questioning, "like ...what?". I know looking at the title is kind of basic surface level stuff but I think Ellison really did title the book emphasizing the invisible man to make the reader take race color out of the picture when reading it. This in and of itself seems like an ironic commentary on race. Maybe as I read the book, the inability of me to look past the narrator's conflicts through a color lens signify me being racist or at least narrow minded in a way. Possibly, if the reader is able to exclude race form their interpretations of the text, the true meaning (whatever that may be) of Ellison's work will come out. I found that I saw significant allusions to songs and African folktale that I am definitely going to look more into. the book offers so much on allusions from Brer Rabbit to Gestalt theory to Louis Armstrong blues songs that I just tried to catalog as much as I could for future reference. Going forward with this book, I do not think that it would be a bad idea to try and read it for a second time and see how my understanding shifts. Maybe , I could find that I know much more about the narrator than what his invisibility suggests.