Doing today’s reading, I noticed myself paying extra attention to the talismanic symbols with which the Invisible Man interacts. Some of these, like Brother Tarp’s mangled chain link, he elects to keep in his close possession. Others, like Mary’s shattered minstrel bank that he struggles to discard earlier in the book, seem to be thrust upon him. In this section, the protagonist’s relationship to the primary symbol, Clifton’s Sambo doll, is a bit more complex. At first he is appalled by it, and tries to defile it in the street, but ultimately, as it becomes linked with Clifton’s untimely death, it becomes symbolic of the inherently complicated consciousness of a black man. So, it is added to the Invisible Man’s collection, and when he is examining it at his desk, noticing the black, invisible string that makes it dance, he thinks, “It had grinned back at Clifton as it grinned forward at the crowd, and their entertainment had been his death…the life of a man is worth the sale of a two-bit paper doll” (435-436). Personal objects, and the agency with or without which they come into one’s possession, thus illustrate a projection of the static qualities as well as the development of literary character; one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.