Call Me/It Ishmael: The Sound of Recognition inCall It SleepandInvisible Man

Abstract

These are, respectively, the first sentence of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and the last sentence of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep. Each centrally keys into the title (and a governing trope) of its particular text; each locates its subject precisely. Ellison's protagonist speaks to us from within a state which he calls “hibernation”; David Schearl takes leave of his readers by entering into one – what the penultimate sentence tells us we “might as well call …sleep.” I want to read these two remarkably contiguous moments alongside each other for a moment before I proceed to a discussion of exactly what such reciprocal facing of texts might entail.