The Method Applied — Wells, Ellison, Matheson

Griffin becomes increasingly visible as appetite. The removal of ordinary social constraint does not produce the freedom his worldview predicts; it reveals the destructive consequences of a conception of freedom detached from moral order.

Ellison's narrator experiences invisibility as a social condition, not an ontological one. His problem is not that he has ceased to exist, but that other people refuse to recognize what is already there — exposing the difference between dignity granted by society and dignity possessed by the person.

Scott Carey carries the experiment furthest. As his body shrinks past every physical and social marker of significance, the question becomes nearly ontological: if almost everything recognizable has been stripped away, what remains?

The eight schools surveyed in The Isms Examined can each describe what happens in these three texts — formalism can trace their structure, historical criticism their period, psychoanalytic criticism their unconscious pressures — without asking whether what the narrative forces the reader to accept as real in each case is true. Resistance-Testimony Methodology asks that question directly of all three: what must be true of reality for Griffin's victims to matter, for the narrator's dignity to survive his invisibility, for Scott Carey to remain a person with almost nothing left to recognize him by? The claim of this project is that only the Imago Dei — human dignity grounded in the nature of the person rather than conferred by recognition, constraint, or scale — is capable of grounding what all three narratives require.