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BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 162 / / Strangers at Home / Rita Keresztesi 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [First Page] [162], (1) Lines: 0 to 49 ——— 0.71701pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [162], (1) An Epilogue Ellison’s Invisible Man “You are saved,” cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; “you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?”Herman Melville,“Benito Cereno” Ralph Ellison, Epigraph, Invisible Man The joke, of course, is that I don’t live in Harlem but in a border area. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man I t seems fitting to end this book with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), a late ethnic modernist novel. Ellison self-consciously draws on the literary traditions of Melville and T. S. Eliot, both of whom he quotes in his epigraph. While the quote from Eliot’s play, written after his return to the United States after an extended absence, draws on the theme of inherited guilt and the main character’s subsequent spiritual self-discovery, the quote from Melville moves beyond the scope of the nuclear family or individual genealogy and specifically addresses the issue of white guilt and the national and historical legacy of slavery. In Melville’s “Benito Cereno” after the “fortunate” conclusion of the mutiny on the slave ship, the San Dominick, the American captain turns to the slave ship’s owner in surprise, seeing Benito Cereno’s still lingering discomfort. The “shadow” Captain Delano still sees cast upon Benito Cereno is the shadow of his captor and servant, Babo, that is the shadow of “The Negro” (“Benito Cereno” 222). Benito Cereno never recovers from the frightening experience of having spent several months under the mutinous rule of the black slaves his ship carries. The San Dominick, poignantly, bears the slogan, seguid vuestro jefe (“follow your leader”). Shortly after the court hearings and Babo’s public execution, Benito Cereno falls gravely ill and dies: “three months after being dismissed by the court, Benito Cereno, borne on the bier, did indeed, follow his leader” (223). As Babo’s ominous shadow is cast upon his white master, so is Melville’s shadow cast over Ellison’s novel. The two apocalyptic writers can be placed at opposite ends of a peculiar ethnic version BOB — University of Nebraska Press / Page 163 / / Strangers at Home / Rita Keresztesi 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 [163], (2) Lines: 49 to 60 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [163], (2) of American modernism, ethnic modernism, since they both comment on the heavy shadow cast by slavery upon the American subconscious.1 While Melville tells his story from the perspective of the naive and well-meaning American liberator , Ellison animates Babo’s ominous shadow and gives him a modern consciousness in the character of the Invisible Man.As ThomasA.Vogler comments on the epigraphs in his article,“Invisible Man: Somebody’s Protest Novel”: “Ellison uses two quotations as epigraphs at the beginning of Invisible Man. One, from Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” suggests the nature of the change the invisible man undergoes in the novel. The other, from Eliot, suggests the discovery of his invisibility which is an essential part of the change”(65). In Vogler’s reading the two epigraphs not only connect the novel to the themes of invisibility and of change, they also place the text as a conduit between literary generations and eras: “The kind of synthesis and evaluation of experience that we expect in a good novel cannot be contemporary with the experience itself. . . . Ellison has roots in the 19th century that are at least as important as those in the 20th; what he writes is as much influenced by what he has read as it is by what he has seen and lived through” (65). As the invisible man crosses over from a specific historical situation to an absurd existence that seems to be outside of historical linearity and of social hierarchy or spatial congruity, he literally enters a no man’s land. For example, early on in the novel, Ellison...

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