tor as an older and a younger man, but this is nowhere nearly so complex as the multiple narrative approach of Faulkner. The characters narrating different parts of Faulkner's book are all unique personalities and minds, but their views together form a prophetic vision of the end of a society which will be no more. In that sense, there is a kinship between the two author's visions: Faulkner is saying that not only the South but modern society in general has lost its course and is coming apart at the seams; Ellison is saying that racism is here to stay and the best a black man can do is to adjust to that dark and terrible fact. Ambiguity, ambivalence and mystery mark the conclusion of the narrator and Ellison's book, but it is clear that the book is not a evolutionary call to arms to overthrow the racist or classist system:
I started out with my share of optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action. . . . The world is just as concrete, ornery, vile and sublimely wonderful as before, only now . . . I know men are different and that all life is divided. . . . Let man keep his many parts and you'll have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business they'll end up forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but a lack of one.
The narrator rejects all roles laid out for him by either black or white standards. He has started out in life believing that the basis of what appears to be race-based prejudiced is not social, not institutional, not cultural, but educational. In other words, if a black man is able to achieve an education, there is nothing that he cannot do in American society. Accordingly, he enters the educational stream, with the highest of hopes and the greatest willingness to conform at every turn in order to please important and powe
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