Patrick Shaw analyzes the historical and chronological order of events in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Developing an accurate order is critical to ensuring the flow of the “Prologue-Body-Epilogue” style, according to Shaw. Although no clear dates are made during the novel (if so, only a few), the reader must use their own knowledge of slavery and prominent racial justice movements. The beginning of the book, for example, describes the Invisible Man’s grandparents to have been enslaved approximately 85 years prior to the current setting and when the reader uses basic knowledge of the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), one can associate the present date with 1948. When the narrator takes the reader back to when he was young, it is then inferred