Because The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is an example of a roman à clef, the reader can logically infer that
the author may have copied the story from a historical manuscript and should have provided source information
the narrator cannot be trusted to be honest, and should be categorized as an unreliable narrator
the author may have had actual experiences with issues of race or known someone similar to the narrator who had
the narrator is actually Johnson, and it is a word-for-word autobiography that he wanted to keep secret