All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. - Ralph Ellison

His name was Clifton and he was black and they shot him. Isn’t that enough to tell? Isn’t it all you need to know?

And I love light. Perhaps you'll think it strange that an invisible man should need light, desire light, love light. But maybe it is exactly because I am invisible. Light confirms my reality, gives birth to my form.

[T]he painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.