Shaking Off the Old Skin: Wallace Stevens on "Invisible Man".

Wallace Stevens's poem "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" explains the requirements of a powerful and practical mythology. In the poem, he explains ways in which abstraction, change, and pleasure will allow a "supreme fiction" to function as an imaginative work, stay relevant in diverse times and applications, and please an audience. This paper decodes some of the complex imagery in the poem and applies the requirements offered by Stevens to Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man. The analysis shows an example of restructuring a myth system through the novel's narrative of cultural identity.