ABSTRACT
This chapter shows James Weldon Johnson’s enactment of the “passing zone” in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a work in which history and the problem of reliability are intricately bound. It argues that, Johnson’s multilayered image vividly illuminates the work’s most salient innovations in further entangling the issue of reliability, by intricately blurring the distinctions between history and fiction through a challenging use of genre and paratexts as components of narrative reliability. The chapter demonstrates that The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man urges to examine the key uses of genre, paratext, and editions in the interrogation of narrative reliability. The questioning of reliability that narratologists have generally applied to fictional worlds, when applied to paratexts, amplifies and extends the interrogation to examine the rigid lines that separate fiction from history and the indeterminate location of reliability within historical discourse.
