Three Days Before the Shooting ... Read Online Free PDF

Rockmore’s—they are dominated by Ellison’s forays into the minds, both waking and dreaming, of his characters.
Given the form of narration that accounted for so much of the success of his first novel and seems to have initially shaped his second, what happens in the 1980s is entirely unexpected, even inexplicable. Seeming to put aside much of the work he had done in the preceding decades, especially the sometimes brilliant if also uneven material from Books I and II, Ellison shifts the mode of narration back to the episodic style in which it began. In the computer files, action moves decidedly outward. The dramatic consequences of this can be summed up in a single transformation: the seven pages that comprise the prologue from the typescripts, in which Hickman and his parishioners arrive in D.C. and attempt to see the Senator, only to be rebuffed, expand to over three hundred pages of narrative in the computer files. Hickman and his group land in D.C., walk through the airport, go to the taxi stand, drive to the Senator’s offices, speak with his secretary, get searched by Capitol security, check into a hotel, go sightseeing, and eat barbecue.
Stranger still, very little of this episodic material is wholly new to the computer files. In a striking move that only adds to the mystery of the second novel’s composition, Ellison appears to have returned in the 1980s and 1990s to the very earliest episodic fragments he ever composed, likely dating from the 1950s and perhaps the early 1960s. Scenes of Hickman in Oklahoma City visiting the shaman Love New, Hickman walking the streets of Washington, D.C., and being accosted by a “red, white, and blue-black” man named Leroy who mistakes him for “Chief Sam the Fucking Liberator,” allof these episodes exist both in undated versions from the early period of the novel’s composition and in computer files from its final period.
This is not to suggest that Ellison’s episodic drafts from the early years and his computer files from the later years are identical. Quite the contrary. Ellison was doing new things with this old material as he revised it over the last decade of his life. He was attempting to draw the fragments together into narrative wholes, stitching together scenes with transitions, the very facet of composition that most dogged him throughout his career. Some of these transitions are seamless, others are still very much unfixed. But what is clearly discernible from the dates upon which he saved the latest versions of his files is that he was gradually putting the pieces together. The three long fragments included in this volume—which we’ve labeled “Hickman in Washington, D.C.,” “Hickman in Georgia & Oklahoma,” and “McIntyre at Jessie Rockmore’s”—represent Ellison’s last efforts to finish his novel. Even finished, however, these important narratives would cry out for transitions, connective verbal tissue that would have made them definitively part of the novel’s whole and, therefore, clarified the whole.
Another significant difference between the episodes as conceived in the early years of the novel’s composition and as revised in the later years is in their respective tones. Some of the early drafts read almost like extensions of Invisible Man , and perhaps to some extent they were in Ellison’s mind. They embody his blues-toned sensibility of the tragicomic, the play-it-by-eye-and-by-ear sense of improvisation. Even in their often unpolished state, they crackle with narrative tension. By contrast, when revisited on the computer in the 1980s and 1990s, the scenes take on a ruminative quality, a kind of narrative repose that forestalls action—at least necessary action—in the name of contemplation. Interspersed with the sequence of dramatic incidents, Ellison has woven a thread of near-essayistic reflection through his favorite themes of American complexity and the black vernacular tradition.
At times, Hickman becomes less a