Chapter 1
In chapter 1 the motif of sex is portrayed with a naked woman. A crowd of men are gathered around the woman as they push the invisible man into an open space with her for their entertainment. Here the ideas of sex and lust become entangled with issues of race and power. The white men who are spectating in the room both demand the invisible man, who is black, to look at her, and threaten him if he obliges. The invisible man's reactions to the women range from wanting “to love her and to murder her,” as lust confronts the complexities of white and black sexual relations (page 19). This is further complicated because he is a black man and she is a white women, making the potential repercussions of attraction dangerous.