"A slightly different sense of time": palimpsestic time in Invisible Man

       And now all past humiliations became precious parts of my
       experience, and for the first time, leaning against that stone
       wall in the sweltering night, I began to accept my past and, as I
       accepted it, I felt memories welling up within me. It was as
       though I'd learned suddenly to look around corners; images of
       past humiliations flickered through my head and I saw that they
       were more than separate experiences. They were me; they defined
       me. I was my experiences and my experiences were me.... (507-08)

He realizes he is a composite man comprised of his past experiences, a living palimpsest of his own history--which, through his many encounters with historical allegories throughout the novel, is also African-American history. As Ellison says in a 1973 interview, the Invisible Man must "create an individuality based upon an awareness of how it relates to his past and the values of the past" ("Ralph Ellison" 75). Ellison's protagonist also learns that the past is not a set of isolated moments but rather a continuity of events, merging with themselves and with the present to form a synchronic whole. He is a product and, in many ways, an incarnation of this eternally present, synchronic time, because Ellison posits that identity is an amalgamation of experiences over time and a constant negotiation with the past.

Having already rejected the cyclical aspect of the Brotherhood's temporality, the Invisible Man now uses these new, Rinehart-inspired discoveries to resist the Brotherhood's teleology. He first expresses disgust with the Brotherhood's historiography, calling it "that spiral business, that progress goo!" (509). He then toys with their theories, playing with their conceit of spiraling history and envisioning how his newfound awareness of identity as a polytemporal and synchronous phenomenon enables him to violate the Brotherhood's rigid temporal dynamics:

       Not only could you travel upward toward success but you could
       travel downward as well; up and down, in retreat as well as in
       advance, crabways and crossways and around in a circle, meeting
       your old selves coming and going and perhaps all at the same
       time. (510)

He deconstructs the Brotherhood's historical philosophy, using its own metaphors of circular alternation to contradict its presumptions of teleological progress. While Ellison engages historical materialism chiefly on this abstract, metaphorical level, criticizing only those metaphors that he assigns to the Brotherhood, he nevertheless attempts to undermine its model of temporality by pitting its dialectical framework against itself. Hegelian dialectics may provide a suitable narrative structure for the Invisible Man's education, but in the political sphere Ellison sees the system as "unreal, an antiphonal game" (501) because it supports unacceptable models of time, identity, and historical progression.

Despite his critique of the Brotherhood's precepts, however, the Invisible Man's quest for temporal consciousness--or a temporal conscience--is far from over. He follows Rinehart's strategy of adopting a contingent and deceptive identity, despite having just equated Rinehartism with "cynicism" and manipulation mere minutes earlier (504). The Invisible Man attempts to reverse the historical determination he has just uncovered, to work backward from his identity to affect history, yet he chooses to affect it through tactics of deception that are as suited to Bledsoe and to Klansmen (510) as they are to Rinehart. (9) He does not consider that if his identity and his history are so interdependent, then his willing adoption of a false, servile identity may have dire historical or material consequences. As a result he fosters--or at least fails to prevent--the Harlem riot that ends the novel. (10) Ironically, the neighborhood that has most expanded the Invisible Man's temporal awareness is set afire because he immediately misapplies his discovery that identity is an accumulation of time, experience, and history.