Part of the Invisible Man’s relationship to the reader is as an audience surrogate, someone who is new, young, and inexperienced to the world he’s navigating just as a reader is new to the specific world of the book. This is a change from the Prologue, when he occupies an explanatory role and is giving a “tour” of his circumstances directly to the reader. But in chapter five, for instance, he has to ask the boy next to him who the riveting speaker is, and the boy’s response is “a look of annoyance, almost of outrage” (123). The Invisible Man is not in the know, and because of the limited first-person perspective, neither is the reader until the Invisible Man asks the questions. The reader is limited to the Invisible Man’s eyes and ears, as when we can no longer hear Bledsoe’s description of his youth because the Invisible Man “no longer listened, nor saw more than the play of light upon the metallic disks of his glasses…” (144). When the Invisible Man goes to Harlem and is even more inexperienced in his setting, “a stranger… just coming to town” (160) according to the policeman, the reader, again, takes in only what the protagonist takes in. As a method of constructing a character, particularly in contrast to less limited perspectives, this creates a strong relationship of identification and even reliance between the reader and the Invisible Man.