Lineages
Every great book stands on older ones. Homer gave Virgil his wanderings and his war; Virgil walked Dante through Hell. Start from a classic and follow its line, one work at a time, across the map.
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What it draws on
Herman Melville, AD 1851
Melville shaped Ellison's way of writing about race. His biographer Arnold Rampersad says the narrator resembles no one in earlier fiction so much as Ishmael, the outsider who survives to tell the story.
Source: Wikipedia, Invisible Man
“Arnold Rampersad, Ellison's biographer, says that Herman Melville had a profound influence on Ellison's way of writing about race: the narrator "resembles no one else in previous fiction so much as he resembles Ishmael of Moby-Dick".” Read it there
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, AD 1864
Ellison's narrator opens with 'I am an invisible man', a deliberate echo of 'I am a sick man', and like the Underground Man speaks to us from a hole: a cellar in Harlem lit by 1,369 stolen light bulbs.
Source: Wikipedia, Invisible Man
“The first line of Invisible Man ("I am an invisible man") for example, is a conscious echo of Notes from Underground ("I am a sick man").” Read it there
No later work in the atlas draws on Invisible Man yet.