Violence In Tod Clifton's Invisible Man

The novel Invisible Man takes place mainly in 1930’s America, starting originally in the south but ultimately surrounding the neighborhood of Harlem in New York City, almost twenty years before the start of the major political changes that encapsulated the civil rights movement, with visual leaders such as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. This was also at a time when the economy was affected by the Great Depression, in which more than half of African American men were out of work. Tensions were high all around, and there was no shortage of stress and conflict.

One of the greatest scenes of violence in Invisible Man takes place towards the end of the book, on the streets of Harlem. The narrator is walking down the street when he sees a man named Tod Clifton on the street corner, selling Sambo dolls. Sambo dolls are little puppets of African Americans often used as racist symbols. At this point in American history, America was to be considered a “white man’s world”, in the sense that segregation was alive and African Americans were considered second-class citizens. Clifton has to sell things on the street at the expense of his own race, just to survive. The symbolism in Tod Clifton selling these dolls is quite astounding. These puppets are attached to string which Clifton uses to put on dances to entice passers-by to purchase a doll that is bigoted against his own race. It is a statement that African Americans in America are like the Sambo dolls,

puppeted and unable to move freely at the hands of the white man.

While Clifton is selling and entertaining on the street, there are cops approaching.

Alerted to their imminent arrival, he takes off, as do the people watching his display, to follow him, for it is made clear that Clifton is not to be vending things on the street. The narrator keeps walking by after Clifton runs away, and has he turns the corner he sees a group of people, including police officers, with Clifton in the middle of it all. He then sees Clifton strike an officer who in turn pulls a gun on him and

shoots.

The meaning of the work as a whole surrounds the idea that the narrator is trying to find his place and his voice in a society plagued by racial tensions and inequality and the search for the narrator’s place of affinity. The uncalled for shooting of Clifton, which can be assumed to have been racially charged, the narrator witnesses is a big turning point in his journey to resolving fundamental issues of his beliefs and sense of belonging. Clifton was a member of the Brotherhood, which was one of the many organizations the narrator tried to tie himself to the teachings of. The Brotherhood is an organization aiming to fight the oppression of African Americans, a cause the narrator wholeheartedly believes in. The narrator sees the shooting of Clifton just after he leaves Brotherhood headquarters, where he had discovered he was purposefully excluded from a meeting. He is feeling a sense of betrayal, for the organization that was supposed to be building others up, was rejecting one of “their own”.

Having seen what Clifton has to do to survive and what happened to him as a result, it is made clear that in order to secure what the narrator wants, civil rights, he cannot give into the “white man’s world” or continue to be a puppet to them. He realizes in order to beat the white-dominated order, he must work outside of it somehow without becoming ignored or a boilerplate. If the narrator did not witness the racially motivated violence that lead to Clifton’s end, he might not have recognized what he planned on doing to combat the white supremacy would never obtain the end result he wanted. He has seen that the Brotherhood is not going help him obtain the end result he wanted.

Tod Clifton was a bright young man who was passionate about his work for the Brotherhood and helping the youth see their potential. He was not callous or politically motivated. Why Clifton left the Brotherhood to be a street merchant, no one knows for sure, but it sends a clear message to the narrator when even the most devoted, pure-hearted Brothers leaves the Brotherhood to do something unquestionably racist, even though he spent so much of his life combating it. The Brotherhood refused to honor the life of Tod Clifton, which angered the narrator further.

The narrator has learned that he cannot rely on blindly following others and their opinions as the true way to search for an escape from prejudice. He has realized that he must form his own opinions, make his own conclusions, lead his own life. He is invisible because he has refused to confront his own feelings on things and has spent most of his life shadowing others rather than inventing himself.