SOURCE: "The Big E(llison)'s Texts and Intertexts: Eliot, Burke, and the Underground Man," in CLA Journal, Vol. XXXVII, No. 4, June, 1994, pp. 377-401.

In the following essay, Adell examines Invisible Man according to the theory of intertextuality expressed by Roland Barthes, noting the connections between Ellison's novel and such works as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground.

Mallarmé might well have been, as Michael Gresset and Noel Polk claim, the first of the moderns to point to intertextuality as a key operation in literary activity when he wrote that

all books, more or less, contain the fusion of a certain number of repetitions: even if there were but one book in the world, its law would be as a bible simulated by the heathens. The difference from one work to the next would afford as many readings as would be put...