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unnumbered, or if numbered, done so with no clear relation to what comes before or after the scene. What results is a certain leveling effect, one that often renders it difficult to discern with even relative certainty the date of a given draft.
However, at least a rough estimation of compositional chronology can be gleaned from simple physical observation of Ellison’s materials. One can make reasoned conjectures as to provenance based upon physical details like typeface and font (he uses different point sizes and sometimes employs italics or boldface print); paper stock (he writes on blue, aqua, and green pages in addition to white, and he writes on every thickness of paper from onionskin to cardboard); reused paper (sometimes he prints or types on letterhead from various organizations, or even on dated drafts of letters printed from his computer); and quality of preservation. Comparing a draft composed on onionskin paper in fading pica typeface and a dot-matrix printout on paper with circular guideholes running up and down both sides suggests their respective eras without specifying a precise date. These details are instructive to a point, but they do little to clarify the larger question of how—and whether—Ellison was revising his manuscript toward completion.
In addition to the numerous undated and fragmentary drafts, Ellison’s archive includes sequential fragments that bear evidence of an author mastering his material. Two in particular resulted in long continuous sequences of episodes: the Book I and II typescripts dating from the 1960s and 1970s and the computer files dating from the 1980s and early 1990s. These two large narratives constitute the bulk of what is included in Three Days Before the Shooting … This volume presents the latest continuous sequences of these drafts in their entirety. When read together, they reveal both striking similarities and marked differences in how Ellison was conceiving his novel across the decades. Many of the characters and many of the key scenes remain the same. To cite one example, the last material Ellison seems to have worked on in the months before his death was a revision of a scene narrated by McIntyre from Chapter 12 of Book I—a raucous episode in which McIntyre investigates an apparent homicide at the Washington, D.C., townhouse of Jessie Rockmore, an old black man, a dealer in antiques, found dead sitting upright, dressed in his Sunday best in a termite-ridden coffin.
More striking, however, is the difference in style and form of narration between the typescripts and the computer drafts. Book I, and more especiallyBook II, reveal the influence William Faulkner had on Ellison in the texture of his prose and his preoccupation with the interiority of his subjects. This mode of psychological fiction marked a decided shift from Invisible Man , which had employed with great success a mode of narration bracketed by a prologue and an epilogue. More surprisingly, the later work on Books I and II differed substantially from early drafts of the second novel in which Ellison places much more emphasis on action. Indeed, the drafts composed in the years immediately after the publication of Invisible Man show a striking affinity with his classic novel, even down to the continuation of characters. (Ellison’s notes suggest that Bliss/Sunraider emerged directly out of Invisible Man’s Bliss Proteus Rinehart.) As Ellison continued to compose, he found himself compelled to explore the psychological valences of his material. “Remember,” he admonishes himself in a note, “that ‘the essence of the story is what goes into the minds of the characters on a given occasion.’ The mind becomes the real scene of the action. And in the mind scene and motive are joined.” Although the Book I and II typescripts retain several vividly drawn episodes—most notably the car-burning scene that Ellison published in 1973 as “Cadillac Flambé” and the aforementioned episode at Jessie