Ellison, after Poe, is the American writer most self-consciously committed to the ideas of the mind thinking, of the mind, that is, as the ultimate source of transcendence or salvation. But he is also the inheritor of a wellspring of emotional pain, the collective black experience in America, that has received its traditional artistic expression in the blues beat and lyric. Several critics … [as well as] Ellison himself have emphasized the influence of blues forms and themes on the structure of [Invisible Man], but some of these critics, perhaps wishing for Ellison to be more black than American, have not given proper emphasis to its intellectual framework.

In fact, the novel amounts to a critique of both the intellectual and the emotional dimensions of the American experience. The Brotherhood (an obvious pseudonym for the Communist Party), which prides itself on its "reasonable point of view" and "scientific approach...