Perhaps the greatest American novel of the 2nd half of the 20th century

Started re-reading Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man yesterday, hadn't read it in maybe more than 20 years and have forgotten most of it, and find the book just as astonishing as on first encounter - probably justifiably listed as the most influential and important American novel of the 2nd half of the 20th century. It's something of a cross between Faulkner and Dostoyevsky, with maybe an element as well of Thomas Wolfe (IM is a very Southern novel) and Richard Wright - and of course elements unique to Ellison. The Dostoyevsky: well, that's primarily in the first chapter (not sure how much this voice returns later in the book, I'm only about 20 percent through) in which the unnamed Invisible narrator describe his living conditions and his attitude toward the world - he's an American Underground Man who is acutely aware of how he, as a black man, is both feared and ignored, mistreated and neglected, in 20th century America - he's full of rage and somewhat frightened at his own capacity for rage, thus his retreat to his well-lighted basement cave - and perhaps his urge to tell his story. The story begins with the famous Battle Royale sequence - the narrator among 10 black "boys" who fight one another before an all-white "smoker" in the southern town where he grew up - probably the most scathing indictment of race relations, hatred, condescension, and misjudgements, ever written - then the narrative moves on to IM's experiences as a student at what is obviously Tuskegee - and the amazing series of scenes in which he drives one of the "trustees," a white benefactor so confident in this benevolence and good intentions, who is near-fatally shocked by the actual conditions and behavior of the rural black population - the long sequences in which Trueblood tells his tale is another one of the great set pieces - making me think of another influence, Melville, as a long narrative composed of these interspersed set pieces and narrative sidelights. The tone at times - the chapel sequence in particular - becomes archly poetic, as in Wolfe, or interior, as in Faulkner. But put all these elements together - along with the unique insight Ellison brings as a black intellectual, the burden of expectations and the suffering from exclusion and condescension and even hatred, and the colloquial voice, the wit, the bitterness - there's really no other novel quite like it. Which makes me wonder whether it was truly "influential" - if so, on whom? - or rather an accomplish unique unto itself, a summing up of tradition rather than the advance of a new wave.