Ras The Mansion Brother Clifton Analysis

After facing Ras the Destroyer, Brother Clifton suggests to the narrator that "sometimes a man must plunge outside history...plunge outside, turn his back" or else risk insanity (Ellison 377). The pressure of the limelight of history has the potential to destroy one's hope, just as Clifton's hope in the Brotherhood was killed. By "plunging outside history," Clifton rejects the Brotherhood's ideology and denies the organization's importance to history. In becoming another man in "the void of faceless faces, of soundless voices, lying outside history," Clifton manifests the futility of trying to change history (Ellison 439). The narrator recognizes the possibility, contrary to the beliefs of the Brotherhood, that history cannot be willed into change by a single group. Despite his faith in the mission of the Brotherhood, the narrator begins to see that nearly everyone he is trying to help is living outside history, is invisible to history, and was even invisible to him, "They'd been there along, but somehow I'd missed them" (Ellison 443). …show more content…
Only it was real and I was living it and it was the only historically meaningful life that I could live. If I'd left, I'd be nowhere. As dead and as meaningless as Clifton" (Ellison 478). He cannot abandon the Brotherhood's ideologies and his hopes for history yet. "Plunging outside history" is removing ourselves from our idealized history and our idealized self to see the truth. By removing ourselves from history, we are able to recognize and accept the truths we are blind to, just as Clifton saw the truth of the Brotherhood's