A Very Lit Blog

 Tod Clifton is an enigma of a character in Invisible Man, but it's hard to figure out why at first glance. You can tell there's something important about him, but you're not quite sure what. His entrance into the story feels like it's filled some sort of void (or perhaps I'm projecting my grief onto you), and his exit is bittersweet and leaves multiple characters angry and confused. Before we can answer the Tod Clifton question, we must talk about the narrator. Throughout the entire book, there is one specific thing that the narrator never really gets: a friend. He's had a temporary caregiver in Mary, but he was bothered by her preaching and looked down on her for having racist memorabilia in her house. He had a kind of paternal figure in Brother Tarp, who gave him a gift he didn't really know what to make of yet felt compelled to keep. But other than that, there isn't really anyone who's come close; and everyone who approaches him with friendliness...

     The narrator travels across plenty of ground in Invisible Man: from college to Liberty Paints to the streets of Harlem. He is one of thousands (at least) in each of those respective environments, and yet, every time something catastrophic happens, he is at the center of it. Now, from a reader's standpoint, this is a very good thing: so many incidents happening! Very fun!     But from a logical standpoint, this makes no sense. How is it possible that this guy is the catalyst for so many events? And these aren't just small accidents, either-- from the illness of a major investor to the literal explosion at the paint factory, everything that he kickstarts just happens to be an extremely damning occurrence. So why? Why is this dude the Leviathan all of a sudden?      Before we can properly answer that question, we need to look at some of the problems he's caused. First, the disastrous road trip with Mr. Norton: He comes to the college hoping...

     In the first part of Native Son, Bigger goes to see a movie with Jack called The Gay Woman . In it, a white woman cavorts behind her rich husband's back. She goes to a jazz club with her lover, and while they are there, a Communist runs in with a bomb. Her lover throws the bomb out of the window, and it turns out that he was trying to kill her husband but got the wrong guy. This makes her run back to her husband, and the movie ends.      This scene is small, more of a transition than anything else, but still, there's a lot to unpack here. First of all, it's never explicitly stated that the woman's lover is black, however, with some context clues (the club and Bigger and Jack's response, most notably) and the overall themes of the book in mind, it's reasonable to assume that he is. So I'm going to go through the rest of this post with this assumption.     Firstly, in the movie, the lover is treated as a commodity for the woman, a pastime as op...