Light Week 4

In Chapter 20 of Invisible Man, the narrator sees Todd Clifton, one of his fellow brothers in the Brotherhood, selling Sambo dolls on the road, even though he knows that this is illegal. The narrator feels betrayed and walks away, while Clifton strikes a policeman and is then shot. The narrator then passes by the scene and follows a group of boys into a train that they all get onto. He then observes the boys and thinks about what he has in common with the boys: “Perhaps, like them, I was a throwback, a small distant meteorite that died several hundred years ago and now lived only by virtue of the light that speeds through space at too great a pace to realize that its source has become a piece of lead…” (441). This quote is significant because it may be foreshadowing, indicating that the Brotherhood is already a “piece of lead”. In this quote, the narrator is the “meteorite” and “light”, and society is the “space”. Ellison once again refers back to the narrator being the source of knowledge and truth, and society (or in this case, his speeches) as darkness, or just space. However, this in this particular part, the narrator does not have full knowledge/ truth about the true nature of the Brotherhood. The narrator also implies that it is only his knowledge that is getting him through the darkness of space, because he is like the “small distant meteorite that died several hundred years ago”. This goes back to the prologue when the narrator says that “nothing should get in the way of our need for light” (7) and “without light, I am not only invisible, but formless as well” (7), because without the light, he would have been the “small distant meteorite that died”.