The book explores the written representation of African American oral stories by Charles Chesnot and Zora Neely Herston and Ralph Ellison for James Alan McPherson, Tony Cady Bambara and John Edgar Widman. In essence, the book compares the relationship between the "narrative of the novel", a text clip within the text tells the story to the listener within the text, with the relationship between the writer and the reader outside the text.

Progress is one of 1899 Chasnot texts, in which the black sound of the white narrator / listener includes Pembra's example in the 1960s for a "frameless" soundtrack to the text of the Widman framework in the late twentieth century. ..