Physicality and Tod Clifton

Tod Clifton’s funeral scene is an interesting scene in which a character barely discovered and without much significance is endowed meaning by the protagonist in its absence. In a way, Tod Clifton as a character is an analogy to a corpse; a living human being, before insignificant and one of many and now dead and rotting, suddenly gains interest in form of grief or/and disgust from others. A corpse is significant and provoking because of its contradictory state: it shows the same form as a life but at the same time reveals the striking fact that it is very much dead and gone from this world.

The protagonist emphasizes the fact that Tod Clifton is now a goner, and he would have nothing to do with the audience’s lives if they were to ignore his absence. At the same time, he identifies the respective individuals in the audience as another Tod Clifton, living in “the box and [they’re] with him, and (…) it’s dark in this box and it’s crowded (…) cracked ceiling and a clogged-up toilet in the gall (…) rats and roaches” (458). In other words, every single African Americans in the audience are not only a non-existing goner, but they are corpses. They do not exist, but they are repulsive beings to other humans, which must refer to the whites.

Although I have not finished reading the entire book, it would be reasonable to assume that the vagueness in the identity of Tod Clifton is not unnecessary. He is a representative of the African Americans in the plot, only more superior and respectable than other laymen. Yet he was shot and killed. His being garners meaning to the whole community as the character loses physicality. Tod Clifton is a character more significant without presence.

RESPONSE (ADA)- “A corpse is significant and provoking because of its contradictory state…”

This posting does really well in highlighting the contradiction of Tod Clifton coming alive through his death but also the black community recognizing the own fragility of their individual/collective life through the taking of one of their own. The quote that you mention reflects the feeling of being collectively buried alive despite each individual being alive. The living corpse image that you’ve put forth is really apt because it encapsulates how the Invisible Man was conceptualizing the black experience as being a part of the walking dead. It takes physical death to realize all the various ways in which black life is suppressed and squashed even when black bodies are breathing. Rather than thinking of their walking dead as a sign of systemic non-existence, it seems that Ellison is proposing an existence that is very much tethered to the concept of death rather than death being the removal of existence. Tod Clifton came “to life” after “death.” The linearity of living as one lives then dies is dramatically complicated with how Clifton is used in the text.

When the narrator leaves the hospital, he is certainly distressed by everything he just went through, but as he teases out this strange feeling he starts to regard it as a positive development. Not only does he wonder about the words and affect he has just expressed in his final conversation with the factory official/doctor, but he is also convinced that he no longer fears important men. To be frank, I was really puzzled by this portion because it seems to represent a distinct shift in his psychology as a character: “We, he, him—my mind and I—were no longer getting around in the same circles. Nor my body either” (249), yet I am having trouble pinning down exactly how he changed, other than these paragraphs expressing his sense of confusion and dissociation. His fear of important men is certainly diminished as we can see from the spittoon incident at the boarding house and his general distrust of authority within the brotherhood, but why did the fight in the boiler room and the subsequent accident and electroshock therapy precipitate this shift in his attitude? In a novel that seems to be seriously concerned with the formation of one’s identity, what are we to make of his brief but nearly total loss of identity and the way it seems to reorient him?

In chapter 15, the Invisible Man is subjected to a series of events that remove his narrative agency in favor of setting up a metaphor for the reader. He smashes a coin bank in the shape of a racist, stereotypical image of an African American, “very black, red-lipped and wide-mouthed” (319). It seems at first that he does indeed have control over this detail of plot, in that he picks it up and smashes it, symbolizing a response to the stereotype. However, as he tries to rid himself of the broken remnants, he finds that bad luck prevents him from leaving it behind despite his purposefulness, thus preventing him from exercising his agency. He first throws the bank away in a trashcan, “casually… and moving on” (327), with the expectation that this choice will hold. A white woman berates him and threatens to call the police on him until he removes it from her trash. He then drops it in the snow, “thinking, ‘There, it’s done.’” A black man picks it up and gives it back to him, and threatens to call the police, so the Invisible Man takes it back. The parallelism, the contrast between two types of characters making similar threats, and the image itself all point to a metaphor for the difficulty of leaving racist stereotypes behind in a society that won’t allow it. This is despite the Invisible Man’s own preferences to simply drop a package, and mirrors instead his lack of narrative agency in non-metaphorical instances of racism. As a fictional character, the Invisible Man is at the mercy of the intended meaning, and although he believes he can, he cannot simply throw a piece of trash away without some coincidence, orchestrated by the author, intervening.

Part of the Invisible Man’s relationship to the reader is as an audience surrogate, someone who is new, young, and inexperienced to the world he’s navigating just as a reader is new to the specific world of the book. This is a change from the Prologue, when he occupies an explanatory role and is giving a “tour” of his circumstances directly to the reader. But in chapter five, for instance, he has to ask the boy next to him who the riveting speaker is, and the boy’s response is “a look of annoyance, almost of outrage” (123). The Invisible Man is not in the know, and because of the limited first-person perspective, neither is the reader until the Invisible Man asks the questions. The reader is limited to the Invisible Man’s eyes and ears, as when we can no longer hear Bledsoe’s description of his youth because the Invisible Man “no longer listened, nor saw more than the play of light upon the metallic disks of his glasses…” (144). When the Invisible Man goes to Harlem and is even more inexperienced in his setting, “a stranger… just coming to town” (160) according to the policeman, the reader, again, takes in only what the protagonist takes in. As a method of constructing a character, particularly in contrast to less limited perspectives, this creates a strong relationship of identification and even reliance between the reader and the Invisible Man.