Ralph Ellison (post 5): Multiple Personality character from Invisible Man became core of the novel Ellison worked on for the next forty years.

“Ellison’s Opus II composition book makes it clear that the second novel belongs to 'Rhinehart,' as he spells the name throughout. Bliss Proteus Rhinehart is the hidden name and complex fate of this transitional character belonging both to Invisible Man and to the second novel…

“As Ellison actually began writing the novel, Rhinehart would go by other names—first Bliss, the child evangelist of indeterminate race…then Movie Man, an itinerant scam artist…and finally Adam Sunraider, a ‘race-baiting New England Senator’…

“An agent of transformation, Bliss Proteus Rinehart is a metaphor for the second novel as a whole, a way of explaining how Ellison could write for forty years without finishing his novel…

“He is of indeterminate race, here specified as ‘Negro, white, Indian’; he is raised in the church by a black preacher; he runs away and reemerges as a movie man looking to exploit a small Oklahoma town…and he gains political office, serving in the United States Senate, where he is assassinated…

“Rhinehart emerges as an individual particularly trapped by his racial indeterminacy, his protean ability to shift shades as well as shapes…

“The novel’s central action, as Ellison conceives it in this embryonic form, concerns Rhinehart’s attempt to return to his neglected past, to embrace his blackness…” (1, pp. 125-134).

Professor Adam Bradley is the coeditor of Ralph Ellison’s unfinished second novel, Three Days Before the Shooting, which Ellison worked on for forty years following publication of Invisible Man. He does not raise the issue of multiple personality.

1. Adam Bradley. Ralph Ellison in Progress: From Invisible Man to Three Days Before the Shooting. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2010.