SOURCE: "The Politics of Ellison's Booker: Invisible Man as Symbolic History," in Chicago Review, Vol. 19, No. 2, 1967, pp. 5-26.

In the following essay, Kostelanetz contends that the narrator of Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man represents "in symbolic form the overall historical experience of the most politically active element" of African Americans.

Invisible Man is par excellence the literary extension of the blues. It was as if Ellison has taken an everyday twelve-bar blues tune (by a man from down South sitting in a manhole up North in New York singing and signifying about how he got there) and scored it for a full orchestra.

—Albert L. Murray.

I

In his collection of essays, Shadow and Act (1964), Ralph Ellison defines the purpose of novelistic writing as "converting experience into symbolic action," and this phrase incidentally captures the particular achievement of his novel, Invisible Man, in which he creates a nameless...