1 - Introduction

Summary

… You just write for your own time, while trying to write in terms of the density of experience, knowing perfectly well that life repeats itself. Even in this rapidly changing United States it repeats itself. The mystery is that while repeating itself it always manages slightly to change its mask. To be able to grasp a little of that change within continuity, to communicate it across all these divisions of background and individual experience, seems enough for me. If you're lucky, of course, if you splice into one of the deeper currents of life, then you have a chance of your work lasting a little longer.

–Ralph Ellison

… The racial turmoil as we know it … was only a distant thunder, not necessarily promising rain. In that state of nervous calm, Ellison could produce a novel which, regarding the character and fate of American Negroes – indeed the character and fate of our whole multi-racial society – was both a summation and a prophesy.

–F. W. Dupee

Published a mere thirty-five years ago, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man shares with older classic works the odd quality of seeming to have been in place for much longer, if not forever. It is a novel that encompasses much of the American scene and character; though told by a single Afro-American and set in the contemporary South and then in modern New York City, its references are to the First World War, to Reconstruction, to the Civil War and slavery, to the founding of the republic, to Columbus, and to the country's frontier past.