The passage at the beginning of chapter 13 where the Invisible Man exits the subway and travels through the streets of Harlem is a great example of this metaphor. The fight in which all participants are blindfolded becomes the symbol of the entire novel and all the narrator's struggles. The protagonist's struggle and search materialize in the attempt to remove the blindfold, thus regaining the ability to "see". While the protagonist's journey takes the form of shedding his own blindfold, he eventually realizes that everyone else is blindfolded. This not only indicates one of the main reasons for his invisibility, but also develops the irony in the novel. The blindfold also symbolizes the bonds of slavery from which blacks of the time were slowly emerging, thus revealing the history and development of black struggle up until the 1940s. The narrator is seen as an example of this