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M Cooper Harriss, Time, Narrative, and All That Jazz: Ellison, Ricoeur, and Invisibility’s Hermeneutic Circle, Literature and Theology, Volume 32, Issue 4, December 2018, Pages 423–433, https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/fry026
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Abstract
We often understand Ellison’s Invisible Man as a ‘jazz novel’ according to certain cultural dimensions of reception, revision, and style. This article deploys Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, in particular his threefold mimesis, to consider more structural, narratival modes of Invisible Man’s achievement. Special attention to the yokel who fells the prizefighter in Ellison’s Prologue by ‘step[ping] inside’ the boxer’s ‘sense of time’ suggests that certain syncopations of narrative time (achieved through antagonistic cooperation between intentio and distentio—‘you step into the breaks and look around’, the invisible man claims) offers a template for a more fundamental jazz metaphor in Ellison’s narrative as it ‘finger[s] the jagged grain’ of experience, refiguring the novel as, itself, a configuration of cultural expression also reflective of Ellison's own particular engagement with narrative’s ‘universals’.
