This volume offers students and scholars a rich variety of interpretations from which to fashion their own views of the novel and the man who created it. Both Ellison's comments, a number of which appear in print here for the first time, and those of ten distinguished scholars of American and African-American literature take the position that there can be no last word on Invisible Man. Different as they are, the essays share a respect for the novel's fluidity and for every reader's encounter with its narrator, story, and meanings.