Invisible Man: A Crisis in Clifton

For this blog, after spending the past two days working on Invisible Man seminar research in class, I wanted to use the blog space to explore some points of analysis from the section my group was assigned for the assignment, which was looking at Brother Clifton’s fallout from the Brotherhood all the way to the final Chapter with the rioting in Harlem. More specifically, I wanted to analyze some of the comments that Anonymous makes to himself following Brother Clifton’s death after he resisted arrest, shot dead on the streets while selling the strange Sambo dolls. Perhaps before examining Brother Clifton himself, it is important to look at the Sambo dolls that he sells on the streets after going missing. In the words of Clifton, “Shake it up! Shake it up! He’s Sambo, the dancing doll, ladies and gentlemen. Shake him, stretch him by the neck and set him down, He’ll do the rest Yes! He’ll make you laugh, he’ll make you sigh” (Ellison. 431). The doll can easily be understood to be working as a foil to Anonymous and what the various elders and mentors of his life see him. The Sambo dolls are puppets, pulled by the strings of a puppet master in control and forced to do whatever it is told, with no thought given to what the puppet may want because the puppet is not actually human and therefore has no individual right to opinion or conduct of thought. In this way, Anonymous can very much be compared to being like the Sambo doll, constantly being pulled in various directions by the likes of Mr. Norton, Dr. Bledsoe, Brother Jack, and even Ras the Exhorter to a certain extent, all of whom refuse to acknowledge the individual identity of Anonymous since they know that his identity is linked to something greater than himself, and thus has no need for one. At this point in the novel, Anonymous does not so much identify his own personal manipulation by the Brotherhood and others in life, which will come following the Harlem riot realization, but correlates it more following Clifton’s brutal death as a fall out from history.  He reflects on the fallout saying, “I’d forget it and hold on desperately to the Brotherhood with all my strength. For to break away would be to plunge… to plunge” (Ellison. 435). Here, Anonymous refuses to look to Clifton’s death as a dreary foreshadowing to his own realizations about the Brotherhood, but instead backwardly uses it to solidify his own illusion of what the Brotherhood means to him. Anonymous is still desperate to maintain that the world that the Brotherhood shows before him is one of truth and reality, something Anonymous longs for following his first awakening after reading Dr. Bledsoe’s letter to Mr. Emerson, after which he promised himself to never let himself be manipulated again from the denial of truth. Yet here he is, with a new life and name within the Brotherhood, an organization that he has so much confidence in, he is willing to take on a new identity that is solely linked to it. In the opinion of Anonymous, Clifton fell out of history because he failed to identify with the history and truth that the Brotherhood had shown him, losing his identity and his life as a consequence. Anonymous is willing to do everything in his power to make sure that such a fallout does not happen to him, and in the process of doing this, he signs away what fragment of individual identity he may have had left by deciding to keep his parasitic relationship to the Brotherhood, something without which would kill him.