They walk farther and reach a hardware store from which they stop and take some flashlights, batteries, and buckets of kerosene. After they hit the music store, they move on to an old tenement building. The narrator then realizes why they took the kerosene from the hardware store. The rioters plan to burn down their own building. After they evacuate the building, the rioters go floor by floor making sure that there is no one left and sloshing kerosene into the rooms as they went. Finally the group goes to the top floor and begins to light the place on fire. They continue to walk when Invisible Man remembers that his briefcase is still upstairs. He runs back up and gets it, then exits the building with the rest of the group to examine their work. While they watch the building burn down, a woman in the crowd recognizes the narrator and calls him by his Brotherhood name. Another man picks up on this and tries to catch him because Ras wants him, and this sends the narrator running again.

The narrator momentarily stops his running when he stumbles across what he believes to be the bodies of four white women and a skeleton. He is stunned until he realizes that the skeleton is from a physician's office, and the bodies are those of mannequins. The narrator then tries to resume his running, but he stumbles across the path of Ras, now called "the Destroyer."

Ras is trying to incite the people to take up arms and fight the police. Upon hearing Ras's voice, the narrator instinctively reaches into his briefcase for his sunglasses, but they have been broken. Ras throws a spear at the narrator but misses. The narrator tries to get the mob to understand that the whole riot has been orchestrated by higher powers, but the people listen only to Ras now. As Ras orders the crowd to hang the narrator, the narrator recognizes the utter absurdity of everything around him and throws the spear back at Ras, catching him in the mouth. This action symbolizes the silencing of Ras because not only if is jaw is locked shut, the people are less likely to listen to their scarred, beaten leader. The narrator then fights his way through the crowd with his briefcase and Tarp's leg chain and runs again.

The narrator finally finds himself hiding outside of an old iron fence, in the hedges, listening as some men retell stories of Ras the Destroyer. Upon being seen, the narrator tries to run once more but falls down an uncovered manhole into a coal pile. The voices above above him try to make him reveal the contents of his briefcase, but the narrator responds in riddles, so the voices let a matchbook fall into the hole and then seal him in it.

The narrator falls into a fitful sleep, then awakens and tries to escape the hole. But his attempt is in vain, as he realizes that there is no ladder in the hole with which he can get out. He lights a match to try to pierce the darkness around him, but the light is too dim. He discovers that in order to see, he must burn the paperwork in the briefcase. He burns his high school diploma first, and all he sees is more empty darkness beyond that in which he already is. He walks along burning everything that he could. Clifton's doll went next and then the anonymous letter, and the paper with his Brotherhood name--which, held side by side, had the same handwriting upon them. Realizing that that one paper had both completely changedshis identity and sent him running, the narrator throws an outrageous fit, whirling and cursing and banging into things around him, then finally stops and falls into a hallucinogenic state.

During his vision, the narrator confronts those who had had some part in controlling his life. The narrator insists on freeing himself from the illusions around him, but the crowd surrounds him with a huge knife and castrates him. This act is an attempt to show total control and supremacy toward the narrator; they have removed his manhood and left him as an empty tool. The question is then posed as to how it feels to be without illusions, and the narrator responds "painful and empty." As the point of victory seems to be at hand for the narrator's nemeses, the narrator begins to laugh back at the crowd, to their confusion. When asked why he laughs, the narrator responds enigmatically that he is no longer blind, and that while those in power believed that they were in total control, they really made no more change in history than a droplet hitting the water. The narrator then watches as the bridge above him begins to stride away like a robot, a mechanical man, and shouts in protest until he wakes up.

Once he awakens, the narrator lies on the floor for some time, reliving the dream over and over. He then makes the decision that he can never return to any aspect of his old life, and that he must start anew. He decides to stay in his hole and think things out in peace and quiet.

Setting
The chapter takes place in Harlem, during the riots, at night.

Motifs
A major motif in this chapter is color, especially the contrast between black and white. One example of this is when the narrator sees the police officers as white helmets riding black horses. Another example of this is when the narrator observes white milk and red blood in the black street. Similarly, the narrator sees a hunk of butter (whose natural color is white) being kicked into the street; and later there is a bag of flour burst in the street. All of these instances can be considered symbolic of race issues--the white representing the white race, and the black representing the black race. The blood running between the two shows the conflict between the two races. At the end of the chapter, the narrator falls into a pitch black manhole and lands in a coal pile where he is totally immersed in the blackness and accepts his invisibility. This can be a metaphor for the narrator's position with his own race.

A second motif is that of running. The narrator can be found running constantly in the chapter with the major events of the chapter happening whenever the narrator briefly stops. This follows the narrator's grandfather's words "Keep This Nigger-Boy Running." When the narrator stops running at the end of the chapter, it signifies the end of the narrator's forced blind run through life.

Symbolism
One form of symbolism in this chapter is the rioters burning their own home. This effort can be seen as symbolic of the entire Brotherhood movement. The rioters are burning away their way of life and can never return and are forcing the other tenants to move out also. Likewise, the Brotherhood is forcibly moving the population away from their current status quo into the future, taking with it people who are content in their present positions, desiring no change. As the narrator says and Scofield responds: "Where will you live?" I said, looking up, up."You call this living?" Scofield said. "It's the only way to get rid of it, man..." (557).

Another form of symbolism is the appearance of Ras the Destroyer in this chapter. During the riots, Ras is seen riding upon a horse dressed as an Abyssinian chieftain--a fur cap on his head, a lion skin cape, a spiked shield on his arm, spurred boots, and armed with a spear. This new barbaric motif shows how due to the riots, many people have totally lost their civilized ways, and regressed back to their more primitive, anarchist mind sets.

Quotations
"I looked at Ras on his horse and at their handful of guns and recognized the absurdity of the whole night and of the simple yet the confoundingly complex arrangement of hope and desire, fear and hate, that had brought me here still running and knowing now who I was and where I was and knowing too that I had no longer to run for or from the Jacks and the Emersons and the Bledsoes and Nortons, but only from their confusion, impatience, and refusal to recognize the beautiful absurdity of their American identity and mine...I knew that it was better to live out one's own absurdity than to die for that of others, whether for Ras's or Jack's" (559).

"...I was invisible, and hanging would not bring me to visibility, even to their eyes, since they wanted my death not for myself alone but for the chase I'd been on all my life; because of the way I'd run, been run, chased, operated, purged--although to a great extent I could have done nothing else, given their blindness (didn't they tolerate both Rinehart and Bledsoe?) and my invisibility" (559).

"...it was important to them that they hang me, lynch me even, since that was the way they ran, had been taught to run" (560).