Three Days Before the Shooting

By Ralph Ellison
Modern Library, $50.00, 1101 pages

The great American novel is the white whale for American writers.  In his uncompleted second book, Three Days Before the Shooting, Ralph Ellison personifies the quest for the great American novel and how difficult it can be. After the success of his first novel, Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison spent the next forty years trying to complete his second novel, the so-called “Oklahoma novel.”  What we have instead are basically two stories which, when combined together, are a novel almost in its completed form.

The story revolves around the shooting of a white racist senator in Washington, by a black man in gallery.  From there, the book shows how the senator became so racist by dipping into the past when he was known as Bliss and was being raised by the Reverend Hickman in the South.  With Hickman at his bedside, the senator relives his memories of his time with Hickman before he ran away and finally became the racist senator. 

The second plot in the collection follows a white reporter as he waits in the hospital near the senator for word about the senator’s condition, wondering why the senator would want Hickman at his side.  It is a story of the consciousness of race in America and the impact it can have on the psyche of the nation.  Combine these two stories and you get Ellison’s masterpiece. 

The editors have done a wonderful job of putting this together from the fragments that Ellison has left over the decades.  After the two stories, you get into the mind of Ellison’s thinking, the editors present fragments of scenes that did not make it into the rest of the main story; as well as individual scenes rewritten two to three times. Some of the differences are minor and others are major.  Even though Ellison had difficulty finishing the book and left it unfinished, it might be better that way. The story is left up to the reader in how it will end.

The writing is like listening to jazz, with stops and starts, long solos and wild percussion.  The language is varied between people and even between scenes.  You go from the deep South, to the far north.  It is a work that goes across generations and cultures.  Yet, at its core, it is looking for what America truly is, and it never did quite got there, which is why Ellison left it unfinished.  This is why Ellison is such a great writer, not just because he published Invisible Man, but because he made something greater than that with this book.

Reviewed by Kevin Winter