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press the behavioral process. Why the narrator acted in this way? From the two questions he asked himself, readers may find their own comprehension. The narrator didn’t kill the man but ran away. It is not the end of the accident. The next day, he saw the man’s picture in the Daily News. “Saw” here is a verb expresses mental phenomena as perception. Then the last verb “thought” expresses mental phenomena as cognition. From these two verbs, or, from what the narrator saw and thought, readers can get a deeper understanding of the social background that blacks are invisible at that time. The episode with the blond man and its subsequent treatment in the newspaper serve to illustrate the extent of the narrator’s metaphorical slavery (Ward & Phillips 2003: 61). From the anger of the narrator, readers can assume that the insulting name is a derogatory racial epithet. Even a drunken man used this name to call blacks. But the newspaper labeled the accident as a mugging which made the blond man become the victim rather than the assailant. In the last sentence, the narrator thought with compassion that the man was a poor fool. Based on this mental process, the theme of racialism is disclosed thoroughly. Many critics agree that Invisible Man has covered all things in America at that time, including the south, the north, the black, the white, segregations, revolutions, crimes, religious, morals, etc. To succeed in expressing all these in this novel, first person narration contributes a lot. Through what the narrator sees and hears, readers will see a vivid picture of American blacks and whites. There is an eloquent proof of it. When the narrator arrives in New York, he says: I had never seen so many black people against a background of the brick buildings, neon signs, plate glass and roaring traffic—not even on trips I has made with the debating team to New Orleans, Dallas or Birmingham. They were everywhere, so many, and moving along with so much tension and a holiday or join in a street fight. There were even black girls behind the counters of the five and ten as I passed. Then at the street intersection I had the shock of seeing a black policeman directing traffic—and there were white drivers in the traffic who obeyed his signals as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Sure I have heard of it, but this was real. My courage returned. This really was Harlem, and how all the stories which I had heard of the city-within-a-city leaped alive in my mind. The vet had been right: for me this was not a city of realities, but of dreams (Ellison 2005: 158 - 159). Most of the verbs which follow “I” express mental processes such as see and hear. A mental process involves two participants, senser and phenomenon. In this paragraph, the senser is the narrator and the phenomenon is the huge contrast between the south and the north. Ellison also uses many verbs to express existential processes. There are 2 “there were”s in this paragraph which disclose the reality at that time. Obviously, the background of the story can be also told by using third person narration, but first person narration can disclose it in a more realistic way with the feelings of the narrator. Readers will not only accept the truth, but feel it. That is to say, first person narration has authority in this aspect. It would be a simple description of the current situation in the north if it used third person narration like this: “He saw there were so many black people