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Given the extremely high—and deserved—reputation of Ellison's fiction and the extreme manageability of its corpus, it is not surprising that Invisible Man has been the subject of many critical studies. Ellison was unusual in the amount of his published discussion of his own work, as well as of his literary assumptions and values. Given the persuasiveness of his writing, it is equally unsurprising that for a long time critical investigations were largely bounded by his own stated premises and intentions.
Thus, FORMALIST, MYTHOLOGICAL, and PSYCHOLOGICAL avenues of inquiry tended to be emphasized, while SOCIOLOGICAL and HISTORICAL considerations were given relatively slight (in light of the novel's subject matter) attention, although this imbalance has been to some degree redressed in recent commentaries. BIOGRAPHICAL discussion of the novel has also been relatively light, although some biographical consideration has been given to Ellison's essays—which, once again, is hardly surprising, in light of his preoccupation in some of those texts with the details and the significance of his own personal history.
In these times of radical re-evaluation, some critics have gone beyond the limits implicitly set by Ellison's own understanding of his novel, particularly on the issue of the narrator's reliability as interpreter of his experiences. Two notable instances of such READER-RESPONSE and even DECONSTRUCTIONIST approaches to Invisible Man are Susan L. Blake's "Ritual and Rationalization: Black Folklore in the Works of Ralph Ellison" (PMLA, 1979) and Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s "To Move without Moving: An Analysis of Creativity and Commerce in Ralph Ellison's Trueblood Episode" (PMLA, 1983), reprinted in his Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1984).
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