In his speech accepting the 1953 National Book Award, Ellison said that he considered the novel's chief significance to be its "experimental attitude." Before "Invisible Man", many (if not most) novels dealing with African Americans were written solely for social protest, most notably, "Native Son" and "Uncle Tom's Cabin". By contrast, the narrator in "Invisible Man" says, "I am not complaining, nor am I protesting either," signaling the break from the normal protest novel that Ellison held about his work. Likewise, in the essay 'The World and the Jug,' which is a response to Irving Howe's essay 'Black Boys and Native Sons,' which "pitEllison and [James Baldwin against Wright and then," as Ellison would say, "gives Wright the better argument," Ellison makes a fuller statement about the position he held about his book in the larger canon of work by an American who happens to be of African ancestry. In the opening paragraph to that essay Ellison poses three questions: "Why is it so often true that when critics confront the American as Negro they suddenly drop their advanced critical armament and revert with an air of confident superiority to quite primitive modes of analysis? Why is it that Sociology-oriented critics seem to rate literature so far below politics and ideology that they would rather kill a novel than modify their presumptions concerning a given reality which it seeks in its own terms to project? Finally, why is it that so many of those who would tell us the meaning of Negro life never bother to learn how varied it really is?"