Ralph Ellison has painstakingly created a separate world in Invisible Man, a novel that succeeds because it is a complex aesthetic creation - humane, compassionate and yet gloriously devoid of morality. . Social commentary is neither the goal nor the driving force of art, and Ellison did not attempt to document a difficult situation. He has created a place where race is reflected and distorted, where terse generalizations are rejected, where personal and aesthetic prisms are distilled into an individualized and articulated consciousness – it is impossible, not to say stupid and simplistic, to attempt to 'exhort a moral from the particular circumstances of the narrator, who is not a cardboard martyr and who represents no one other than himself: he does not represent the Everyman, nor does he embodies the suffering of his race. The narrator can provoke questions and discussions about these two themes precisely because it is an individualized experience – unassailable, apolitical1 and ultimately aesthetic. Ellison achieved this by projecting his words through several fun mirrors, and particularly by carefully layering the valences and meanings of specific images—all aesthetic experience, especially the written word, is inherently a distortion of reality. Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics, believed that written language depended on sequentiality to be intelligible2. Meaning and coherence require analyzing one meaningful unit at a time, phoneme by phoneme, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, until meaningful meaning is obtained and stacked on top of other units for an expanded or qualified signifying body, each distinct signifier develops the previous one and prepares the ground for the next. Signifiers middle of paper......all the reasons for this problem. What did our narrator do to be so black and blue? On this, he is silent, and that is quite normal. What can he do about it? No response. What can we do about this? Silence. What Invisible Man does, however, is present this particular human experience in such a way that every event counts - each episodic work is vivid, crystalline, jewel-like, and Ellison achieves this shimmering accomplishment by folding events together others and giving specific aesthetic value to the resulting reflections. Politics comes into play, but it's mixed with more nightmarish images. There's none of that total commitment to a particular system that you find, for example, in Richard Wright's Native Son. Back2. See Mythologies of Roland Barthes. Back3. Italics presented as they appear in the novel.