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[Three Days Before the Shooting...] [Author: Ellison, Ralph] [April, 2011]
At his death in 1994, Ralph Ellison left behind roughly two thousand pages of his unfinished second novel, which he had spent nearly four decades writing. Long awaited, it was to have been the work Ellison intended to follow his masterpiece, Invisible Man. Five years later, Random House published Juneteenth, drawn from the central narrative of Ellison’s unfinished epic.
Three Days Before the Shooting . . . gathers together in one volume, for the first time, all the parts of that planned opus, including three major sequences never before published. Set in the frame of a deathbed vigil, the story is a gripping multigenerational saga centered on the assassination of the controversial, race-baiting U.S. senator Adam Sunraider, who’s being tended to by “Daddy” Hickman, the elderly black jazz musician turned preacher who raised the orphan Sunraider as a light-skinned black in rural Georgia. Presented in their unexpurgated, provisional state, the narrative sequences form a deeply poetic, moving, and profoundly entertaining book, brimming with humor and tension, composed in Ellison’s magical jazz-inspired prose style and marked by his incomparable ear for vernacular speech.
Beyond its richly compelling narratives, Three Days Before the Shooting . . . is perhaps most notable for its extraordinary insight into the creative process of one of this country’s greatest writers. In various stages of composition and revision, its typescripts and computer files testify to Ellison’s achievement and struggle with his material from the mid-1950s until his death forty years later. Three Days Before the Shooting . . . is an essential, fascinating piece of Ralph Ellison’s legacy, and its publication is to be welcomed as a major event for American arts and letters.
Three Days Before the Shooting . . . gathers together in one volume, for the first time, all the parts of that planned opus, including three major sequences never before published. Set in the frame of a deathbed vigil, the story is a gripping multigenerational saga centered on the assassination of the controversial, race-baiting U.S. senator Adam Sunraider, who’s being tended to by “Daddy” Hickman, the elderly black jazz musician turned preacher who raised the orphan Sunraider as a light-skinned black in rural Georgia. Presented in their unexpurgated, provisional state, the narrative sequences form a deeply poetic, moving, and profoundly entertaining book, brimming with humor and tension, composed in Ellison’s magical jazz-inspired prose style and marked by his incomparable ear for vernacular speech.
Beyond its richly compelling narratives, Three Days Before the Shooting . . . is perhaps most notable for its extraordinary insight into the creative process of one of this country’s greatest writers. In various stages of composition and revision, its typescripts and computer files testify to Ellison’s achievement and struggle with his material from the mid-1950s until his death forty years later. Three Days Before the Shooting . . . is an essential, fascinating piece of Ralph Ellison’s legacy, and its publication is to be welcomed as a major event for American arts and letters.
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First published January 1, 2010
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About the author
Ralph Ellison
100 books2,018 followersRalph Ellison was a scholar and writer. He was born Ralph Waldo Ellison in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, named by his father after Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ellison was best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953. He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory (1986). For The New York Times , the best of these essays in addition to the novel put him "among the gods of America's literary Parnassus." A posthumous novel, Juneteenth, was published after being assembled from voluminous notes he left after his death.
Ellison died of Pancreatic Cancer on April 16, 1994. He was eighty-one years old.
Ellison died of Pancreatic Cancer on April 16, 1994. He was eighty-one years old.
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April 3, 2023So going into this, you should know that it's not Ralph Ellison's second novel. And despite what the cover of the other version of this material "Juneteenth" says, that's also not Ralph Ellison's second novel. John F Callahan edited both, but his editing here suggests he knows better. Instead, this represents some half of the written material that Ralph Ellison wrote after the publication of Invisible Man. The basic editorial decision making process was: where they could determine Ralph Ellison's intentions, they honored those. That's a difficult process in part because he rewrote numerous of the sections, sometimes with very little change. According to Callahan, one section was a nearly identical section except for one punctuation change. So what we're looking at here is about 1000 pages (and these are dense pages too) of text toward a second novel, and not the 2000-3000 pages of total material produced. This suggests to me (and this have nothing to do with intent) is that we have more than enough material to make some choices as readers. If you have read the collected letters, you'll recall that Ellison talking about the novel begins before the final edits of Invisible Man were complete in 1952 or so, and he continues to work on it possibly to the day he died 40 years later. He published a few pieces of it throughout the years, but that amounts to like a 30 page chapter in the early 60s, and then another in the 70s. You've probably run across an anthologized version of "Battle Royal" in lit anthologies. Imagine trying to extrapolate the whole novel from that chapter.
So the novel begins in Washington DC where a group of Southern Black church members fronted by Rev Hickman have arrived to warn a US senator of some kind of danger. They are turned away at his office, where they are harassed by security, and later that day he is shot by an assassin. We know from this opening that this group knows this senator, and there's clearly some sense of their losing that connection over the years. The next section is narrated by a white reporter who is on the scene and tries to piece together event through he very confused perspective and the ambiguous pieces of information available to him. And by first section, I mean some 300 pages or so. From there, the next big section is about the origins of Hickman and a boy named Bliss, who will grow up to become the senator. What I haven't mentioned is that the senator is a kind messianic/demagogue figure that embodied the worst impulses of racist white America.
So I mention these first two sections because according to the Callahan, they are the oldest and most polished (or possibly most worked over) sections. What seems clear to me is that Ralph Ellison was just simply not working on a single novel. The quality of these opening sections tells me there's at least three novels, and possibly four. So the shame of the project is not so much that he couldn't pull it all together (which he never needed to do) but to recognize the more fractured nature of the project and turn this into a multi-novel writing project like Marilynne Robinson's Gilead books, where it's not all one continuous narrative, but a constant revisiting. Or maybe Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha is a better comparison, given Ellison's affection for Faulkner's work and the clear influence on this novel (as well as Invisible Man).
For me the novels are this:
1) The shooting told by McIntyre
2) Hickman's and Bliss's origins
3) Hickman in DC, Georgia, and Oklahoma
4) The further continuing story of Bliss
So the novel begins in Washington DC where a group of Southern Black church members fronted by Rev Hickman have arrived to warn a US senator of some kind of danger. They are turned away at his office, where they are harassed by security, and later that day he is shot by an assassin. We know from this opening that this group knows this senator, and there's clearly some sense of their losing that connection over the years. The next section is narrated by a white reporter who is on the scene and tries to piece together event through he very confused perspective and the ambiguous pieces of information available to him. And by first section, I mean some 300 pages or so. From there, the next big section is about the origins of Hickman and a boy named Bliss, who will grow up to become the senator. What I haven't mentioned is that the senator is a kind messianic/demagogue figure that embodied the worst impulses of racist white America.
So I mention these first two sections because according to the Callahan, they are the oldest and most polished (or possibly most worked over) sections. What seems clear to me is that Ralph Ellison was just simply not working on a single novel. The quality of these opening sections tells me there's at least three novels, and possibly four. So the shame of the project is not so much that he couldn't pull it all together (which he never needed to do) but to recognize the more fractured nature of the project and turn this into a multi-novel writing project like Marilynne Robinson's Gilead books, where it's not all one continuous narrative, but a constant revisiting. Or maybe Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha is a better comparison, given Ellison's affection for Faulkner's work and the clear influence on this novel (as well as Invisible Man).
For me the novels are this:
1) The shooting told by McIntyre
2) Hickman's and Bliss's origins
3) Hickman in DC, Georgia, and Oklahoma
4) The further continuing story of Bliss
March 22, 2010
An unfinished masterpiece - like the United States.
April 27, 2024
I’ve read this 1100-page behemoth twice. It’s a commitment. But despite it being unfinished, and in certain areas unpolished, Three Days Before the Shooting… is the greatest novel I have ever read.
Now first off, that’s not the actual title to what Ralph Ellison’s second novel was going to be. I’ve read it was likely going to be called Juneteenth, which was the name of a much-abridged version published previously by Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan. Callahan released Juneteenth in 1999, five years after Ellison’s death in 1994. In 2010, Callahan along with English professor Adam Bradley collectively released Three Days Before the Shooting..., the title of which refers to the first five words of the novel. It contains all the writings Ellison did complete for his second novel, including alternate versions of scenes, chapters, and whole sections. Outside of it being a breathtaking epic in its own right, witnessing the changes and revisions it underwent over four decades of writing is a fascinating thing to behold, and a rare immersive glimpse into Ellison’s processes as a writer.
Ellison is of course most known for his seminal work, Invisible Man, which was released in 1952. He did publish several collections of essays in the decades that followed, however his second novel was doomed to forever be a work in progress.
The plot is hard to pin down succinctly. It’s almost like an afterthought, most of the journey being tangential stories and observations by the main characters, even the secondary and tertiary ones. The central narrative is essentially a deathbed vigil. A race-baiting biracial senator (who passes as white) is gunned down during a speech in D.C. and then confronted on his hospital bed by the black preacher (and former jazz musician) who adopted him as a child. But that hardly even begins to hint at the deeper stories that lie within. At times one does indeed follow the senator in question, Adam Sunraider, who as a young boy named Bliss becomes the eventual prodigal son to his preacher foster father, Alonzo Hickman. Bliss is raised in the black church under the tutelage of Hickman who is molding him into a future preacher, and given’s the boy’s biracial status, the good Reverend has lofty hopes that Bliss will grow up to be an advocate and voice for their people. But instead Bliss runs away and uses his oratory gifts to become a con man and eventual politician whose policies and rhetoric betray the very people who raised him.
Before we learn much about the senator or Hickman, Book 1 of this volume dives into the point of view of white D.C. journalist Welborn McIntyre, who having witnessed the assassination of Sunraider on the Senate floor, spends much of his time in the hospital waiting for updates and trying to get a story. As he tries to make sense of current events, long-dormant pieces of his past begin to haunt him: his time in the war (which includes an odd link to the assassin himself), a passionate interracial relationship he was once in when he lived in Harlem, and then more recent times when as a newspaperman he covered the controversial and mysterious senator. Some of these events overlap and serve as a parallel to other sections of the book, like when Hickman arrives in D.C. and tries to get in touch with Sunraider/Bliss to warn him of potential danger (which of course later comes true). We indeed spend a lot of time with Hickman, first in the hospital reminiscing with his boy Bliss-turned Senator Sunraider, and then backward to the days immediately prior as he site-sees in D.C., and then before that to his time in Georgia and Oklahoma trying to learn of the danger that awaits Bliss as warned by an old friend (and unrequited love interest). Glimpses here and there of a young Hickman cross the pages as well, perhaps most importantly during the tragic circumstances of Bliss’s birth on the heels of a lynching, which provides Hickman the impetus to give his life over to God and forgo his secular ways. The sanctified voice of Reverend Hickman oft-times battles with the gutbucket-blues-intoned voice of his youthful days as a jazz musician, and this makes for some great inner dialogue as our worldly wise—and weary—yet spiritually-centered hero tries to come to terms not only with Bliss’s betrayal, but the hypocrisy and craziness of this country he lives in, ever at odds with itself in practice and purpose.
I believe many of the racial themes that Ellison tackled in Invisible Man were only a scratching of the surface, and that they are fully realized and explored in this book. Some of the prose is so profound and insightful that it underlines and heightens the tragedy to American literature it is that Ellison died before the work was ever completed, because this thing is as close to the Great American Novel I have ever seen. And while we have a great gift in this unfinished volume finally having come to light, I’ve found that very few people even know about it. It gets nowhere near the recognition or notoriety that Invisible Man gets, and that’s a crying shame.
At the same time, I’m very curious what would have happened had the book ever ended up in an actual editor’s hands. What would have survived? There are times when a couple characters sit down and just talk for a long time, seemingly rambling, sometimes quite literally for a hundred pages. And while things like character and theme are being explored very thoroughly, often it takes the narrative nowhere. Whole sections of beautiful and thoughtful prose would likely have been cut in the name of pacing. So perhaps that’s the silver lining in seeing the novel in this unfinished form. Indeed the book’s structure may come across as frustrating to the average reader in search of a linear tale or some kind of formula, but trust me, strap in and enjoy this lazy river ride that constantly branches off in all directions—the rewards are immeasurable. Like our jazzman Alonzo Hickman letting loose on his trombone in a jam session, Three Days Before the Shooting… is jazz to its core, a bebopin, signifyin, Oh-Didn’t-He-Ramble tale that speaks gospel truth even as it plays the dozens. And like jazz, we should only be concerned with the melody as a starting point, the real treat being the solos and riffs that produce such eloquent one-offs, singed with all heartbreak of the blues and all hope of the spiritual.
I can feel Ellison’s frustrations as he wrote this. Especially in some of the rewritten and revised parts we get a peek at, it’s evident Ellison was constantly going back and over and over again at his words. Sometimes the over-editing was perhaps to a fault, as while certain revisions do expound and elaborate, the pacing of the narrative suffers in turn. And despite the girth of story we do have, gaps and gnawing questions still remain: What happened after this part? What’s the significance with this person? And how does it end? The effect is that of a perfectionist constantly seeking to shape and hone his craft, all while tackling incredibly deep themes to their bottommost depths in an attempt to get it just right, while never being fully satisfied. Folks, Ellison got as close as he could sans a finished product. What we have available to us today is still very much a masterpiece—Three Days Before the Shooting…, a powerful and lyrical story of race, fathers and sons, and an America of contradictions, set against a backdrop of jazz and the blues that play right off the page in all vibrancy and color. Take some time if you can. Treat yourself.
Now first off, that’s not the actual title to what Ralph Ellison’s second novel was going to be. I’ve read it was likely going to be called Juneteenth, which was the name of a much-abridged version published previously by Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan. Callahan released Juneteenth in 1999, five years after Ellison’s death in 1994. In 2010, Callahan along with English professor Adam Bradley collectively released Three Days Before the Shooting..., the title of which refers to the first five words of the novel. It contains all the writings Ellison did complete for his second novel, including alternate versions of scenes, chapters, and whole sections. Outside of it being a breathtaking epic in its own right, witnessing the changes and revisions it underwent over four decades of writing is a fascinating thing to behold, and a rare immersive glimpse into Ellison’s processes as a writer.
Ellison is of course most known for his seminal work, Invisible Man, which was released in 1952. He did publish several collections of essays in the decades that followed, however his second novel was doomed to forever be a work in progress.
The plot is hard to pin down succinctly. It’s almost like an afterthought, most of the journey being tangential stories and observations by the main characters, even the secondary and tertiary ones. The central narrative is essentially a deathbed vigil. A race-baiting biracial senator (who passes as white) is gunned down during a speech in D.C. and then confronted on his hospital bed by the black preacher (and former jazz musician) who adopted him as a child. But that hardly even begins to hint at the deeper stories that lie within. At times one does indeed follow the senator in question, Adam Sunraider, who as a young boy named Bliss becomes the eventual prodigal son to his preacher foster father, Alonzo Hickman. Bliss is raised in the black church under the tutelage of Hickman who is molding him into a future preacher, and given’s the boy’s biracial status, the good Reverend has lofty hopes that Bliss will grow up to be an advocate and voice for their people. But instead Bliss runs away and uses his oratory gifts to become a con man and eventual politician whose policies and rhetoric betray the very people who raised him.
Before we learn much about the senator or Hickman, Book 1 of this volume dives into the point of view of white D.C. journalist Welborn McIntyre, who having witnessed the assassination of Sunraider on the Senate floor, spends much of his time in the hospital waiting for updates and trying to get a story. As he tries to make sense of current events, long-dormant pieces of his past begin to haunt him: his time in the war (which includes an odd link to the assassin himself), a passionate interracial relationship he was once in when he lived in Harlem, and then more recent times when as a newspaperman he covered the controversial and mysterious senator. Some of these events overlap and serve as a parallel to other sections of the book, like when Hickman arrives in D.C. and tries to get in touch with Sunraider/Bliss to warn him of potential danger (which of course later comes true). We indeed spend a lot of time with Hickman, first in the hospital reminiscing with his boy Bliss-turned Senator Sunraider, and then backward to the days immediately prior as he site-sees in D.C., and then before that to his time in Georgia and Oklahoma trying to learn of the danger that awaits Bliss as warned by an old friend (and unrequited love interest). Glimpses here and there of a young Hickman cross the pages as well, perhaps most importantly during the tragic circumstances of Bliss’s birth on the heels of a lynching, which provides Hickman the impetus to give his life over to God and forgo his secular ways. The sanctified voice of Reverend Hickman oft-times battles with the gutbucket-blues-intoned voice of his youthful days as a jazz musician, and this makes for some great inner dialogue as our worldly wise—and weary—yet spiritually-centered hero tries to come to terms not only with Bliss’s betrayal, but the hypocrisy and craziness of this country he lives in, ever at odds with itself in practice and purpose.
I believe many of the racial themes that Ellison tackled in Invisible Man were only a scratching of the surface, and that they are fully realized and explored in this book. Some of the prose is so profound and insightful that it underlines and heightens the tragedy to American literature it is that Ellison died before the work was ever completed, because this thing is as close to the Great American Novel I have ever seen. And while we have a great gift in this unfinished volume finally having come to light, I’ve found that very few people even know about it. It gets nowhere near the recognition or notoriety that Invisible Man gets, and that’s a crying shame.
At the same time, I’m very curious what would have happened had the book ever ended up in an actual editor’s hands. What would have survived? There are times when a couple characters sit down and just talk for a long time, seemingly rambling, sometimes quite literally for a hundred pages. And while things like character and theme are being explored very thoroughly, often it takes the narrative nowhere. Whole sections of beautiful and thoughtful prose would likely have been cut in the name of pacing. So perhaps that’s the silver lining in seeing the novel in this unfinished form. Indeed the book’s structure may come across as frustrating to the average reader in search of a linear tale or some kind of formula, but trust me, strap in and enjoy this lazy river ride that constantly branches off in all directions—the rewards are immeasurable. Like our jazzman Alonzo Hickman letting loose on his trombone in a jam session, Three Days Before the Shooting… is jazz to its core, a bebopin, signifyin, Oh-Didn’t-He-Ramble tale that speaks gospel truth even as it plays the dozens. And like jazz, we should only be concerned with the melody as a starting point, the real treat being the solos and riffs that produce such eloquent one-offs, singed with all heartbreak of the blues and all hope of the spiritual.
I can feel Ellison’s frustrations as he wrote this. Especially in some of the rewritten and revised parts we get a peek at, it’s evident Ellison was constantly going back and over and over again at his words. Sometimes the over-editing was perhaps to a fault, as while certain revisions do expound and elaborate, the pacing of the narrative suffers in turn. And despite the girth of story we do have, gaps and gnawing questions still remain: What happened after this part? What’s the significance with this person? And how does it end? The effect is that of a perfectionist constantly seeking to shape and hone his craft, all while tackling incredibly deep themes to their bottommost depths in an attempt to get it just right, while never being fully satisfied. Folks, Ellison got as close as he could sans a finished product. What we have available to us today is still very much a masterpiece—Three Days Before the Shooting…, a powerful and lyrical story of race, fathers and sons, and an America of contradictions, set against a backdrop of jazz and the blues that play right off the page in all vibrancy and color. Take some time if you can. Treat yourself.
January 28, 2022
My disappointment that Ellison could never finish this work is now all the greater. The opening of these characters: McIntyre, Hickman, Bliss . . . and the machinations beyond them and within them, have created such a reflective layering of challenges to identity and vision, to the word and the idea, are so much further in their ambition than Invisible Man. Even so, I cannot imagine how or where he might have taken them all to create a synthesis of any kind--no wonder he was so blocked. For that reason, I return to it for its long scenes and moments of characters sitting on a porch trading the wisdom of youth, of quasi-historical sermons, of asylum interviews. Read it for these, for the moments he created for us. And we take it where we will.
June 11, 2019
I have read amazing authors from numerous countries and, yet, by far this extremely challenging book is the best novel I have ever read. Full stop.
January 12, 2015
Failed attempt at grandness. I mean it probably could be great, but still reads and feels and looks like failure.
Beware - it says three days, but it might take you three years to read it :)
Beware - it says three days, but it might take you three years to read it :)
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June 7, 2012Well, this is my third attempt to read this, and once again I am giving up before it's done. This doesn't mean I won't try again, just that right now I know I won't be finishing it any time soon. Ellison was a genius and his writing here is brilliant, but it's easy to see why he never finished. He took on something enormous and lost his way. All the same, I'll be trying again.
November 24, 2022
Put this book in front of me again and i will violently have diarreia. Dont play me . This was actually the worst thing ive ever tried to read
August 29, 2023
Unfortunate this novel is rather lengthy and its unfinished form presents some challenges approaching and interfacing with, as taken as a whole it represents one of the most important American novels produced, the fruit of decades of laborious and careful effort, composed by one of this nation's most gifted, thoughtful and visionary authors, in thrilling modern modes. A book to add to your bucket list for brave explorers and determined thinkers, scholars, which is absolutely worth the energy and occasional hurdles required in engaging with. Somewhere between the absurd, surreal, picaresque excellence of Kafka, Faulkner, O'Toole, Voltaire, while steeped in the landscapes, language, distinctive character and storytelling of Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, rich histories public and personal, culture and iconography of Jazz and soul cuisine. A stunning treatise as relevant today as when composition was first ambitiously begun, as significant and far reaching as novels like Great Gatsby, Huck Finn, Les Miserable, deserving of recognition and acclaim comparable. I hope this is someday adapted for the screen or as a miniseries, could be positively legendary. Also a riveting and pertinent examination of the role of cinema and media in our collective consciousness and conscience, with astonishingly incisive insights shed illuminating phenomena of our present day just as perceptively. Highest recommendations.
November 9, 2022
Read books 1 and 2 for class—so not the whole collection but just gonna say finished reading lol. I want to re-read / read the entire thing at some point but honestly don’t know if I ever will because it’s pretty intense and a difficult read (especially if I tried to read it outside of class environment). But despite all that it was really really good & I enjoyed class discussions a lot
Also, I want to read Invisible Man by Ellison because professor talked a lot about it!
Also, I want to read Invisible Man by Ellison because professor talked a lot about it!
June 1, 2020
Read this before you read "Juneteenth." It might seem tedious to read similar passages over again, but it is fascinating to discover what Ellison changed about this manuscript as well as what the editors left out of the posthumously-published novel.
January 28, 2022
As a writer it was fascinating to read what Ellison had written and what the editor created via Juneteenth. There is a lot of genius in here and a lot of compelling storytelling but not a complete narrative arc. this is for fans of Ellison but it is far from a complete novel.
October 16, 2024
One can only wish Ellison had finished what promised to be a magnificent second novel!
June 27, 2016
I enjoyed the preface to the book. Ralph Ellison spoke about his difficulty in writing the book. I felt a kinship when he spoke about his writing process and how long it was taking him to finish the book. Reading this part first helped me understand the book better. Ellison's writing style was engaging and interesting. The story had emotion, and sometimes I wished I had his talent for writing a believable story. The way he described the conflict between blacks and whites in that time period, I could see the scenes unfolding. We have a lot to thank the ones who came before us not only writers, but activist as well. I feel like we are regressing to that time once more where hate is more fashionable than love. Great weaving of details. All writers should pick this up to learn about the literary process.
May 28, 2010
I tried to read this book since I have been looking forward to its publication. However, I found the text to be cumbersome and disjointed and gave up after the first 50 pages.
For those who have the patience to get through the 900+ pages, I am certain that it will be very rewarding.
For those who have the patience to get through the 900+ pages, I am certain that it will be very rewarding.
July 24, 2011
I had to remind myself that I was reading a novel that was never finished- wanting the cohesive ending to tie up everything, but not getting it. The prose is outstanding, though.
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