Published in 1952, Invisible Man featured a protagonist whose activities enabled the novel's author, Ralph Ellison, to explore and to blend themes specifically tied to the history and plight of African Americans with themes, also explored by many European writers with whose works Ellison was familiar, about the fractured, evanescent quality of individual identity and character. For this thematic blend, Ellison received two related criticisms: that his allegiance to the concerns of the individual prevented him from directing his art more toward the political action that critics believed was demanded by his era's social and political state of affairs; and that his indulging in European fictional modes lessened his contribution to the development of a distinctly African American novelistic style.

Ellison found these criticisms to voice a common demand, namely that writers should censor themselves and sacrifice their individuality for supposedly more important political and cultural purposes. He replied that it demeans a people and its artists to suggest that a particular historical situation requires cultural segregation in the arts. Such a view characterizes all artists as incapable of seeing the world—with all its subtleties and complications—in unique yet expressive ways, and it makes the narrow assumption that audiences are capable of viewing the world only from their own perspectives.

Models for understanding Invisible Man that may be of more help than those employed by its critics can be found in Ellison's own love for and celebration of jazz. Jazz has never closed itself off from other musical forms, and some jazz musicians have been able to take the European-influenced songs of U.S. theater and transform them into musical pieces that are unique and personal but also expressive of African American culture. In like manner, Ellison avoided the mere recapitulation of existing literary forms as well as the constraints of artistic isolation by using his work to explore and express the issues of identity and character that had so interested European writers.

Further, jazz, featuring solos that, however daring, remain rooted in the band's rhythm section, provides a rich model for understanding the relationship of artist to community and parallels the ways the protagonist's voice in Invisible Man is set within a wider communal context. Ellison's explorations in the novel, often in the manner of loving caricature, of the ideas left him by both European and African American predecessors are a form of homage to them and thus ameliorate the sense of alienation he expresses through the protagonist. And even though Invisible Man's protagonist lives alone in a basement, Ellison proves that an individual whose unique voice is the result of the transmutation of a cultural inheritance can never be completely cut off from the community.