JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. National Council of Teachers of English is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to College English. stute readers of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man have routinely evinced dissatisfaction with the novel's epilogue. Some have noted that the apparent merging of narrator and author in the novel's final pages too abruptly effaces the reader's ironic distancing from the narrator, thus loading the epilogue's political dice (Fabre, "Narrator/Narratee"; McSweeney; Smith). Others have complained of the unproblematic celebration of American democracy in the closing pages of a novel that has yielded scant basis for such loyalty (Brennan; Gayle; Gibson). Still others have criticized the epilogue's ahistoricism and would-be universalism-its reconceptualization of racism as a metaphor for an abstract human condition, its claim that the black narrator, hitherto rendered invisible primarily because of the color of his skin, now encompasses the invisibility of all alienated humanity (Kaiser; Schaub; Mason; Watts). Whether focusing on form or politics, these critics have argued that the epilogue to Invisible Man constitutes a dramatic rupture with what has preceded it, and an attempt to impose a psychological, political, and philosophical solution possessing little organic relation to the rest of the novel. I share this uneasiness about the ending of Ellison's novel, but I don't think the epilogue is disjointed; rather I see it as the culmination of an embedded rhetoric that operates largely on subliminal levels throughout the text. This rhetoric is the rhetoric of anticommunism. (Following Joel Kovel, I use "anti-Communism" to signify opposition to the line and strategy of the Communist Party and "anticommunism" to signify a generalized fear and hatred of the left.) The confident proclamations of democracy and universal humanism in the novel's final pages are inseparable from the nightmare scenario of a few pages before, when the hero dreams that he is castrated and has his testicles tossed off the George Washington Bridge by a lynching party in which Brotherhood leader Brother Jack wields the knife. Ever since I have known something about the history of Communist activity in the US, I have been repelled by this image. Whatever its weaknesses, the Communist Party (CP) forthrightly fought racism, and in 1952-when Ellison was garnering rave reviews for his novel and getting positioned to receive the National Book Award-the CP, itself reeling from the Smith Act trials, was rallying thousands to protest the legal lynching of Willie McGee, a black Mississippian falsely accused of rape (Horne, Communist Front?; Mitford 160-94; Civil Rights Congress). Invisible Man's closing ly...