In reinventing the idea of the invisible man in order to represent the experiences of an individual whose consciousness and identity is constituted by a ceaseless conflict with the conditions of everyday life in a racist society, Ellison’s novel implicitly proposed a perceptive reinterpretation of Wells’s ostensibly far simpler, far more superficial novella. For Invisible Man hints that, though not notably interested in the racial politics of identity, in spite of the fact that its central character is an albino, The Invisible Man itself is nonetheless a book about the existential condition of
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