The invisible man: puppet or puppeteer? We could say that we are all simple puppets, or dolls, condemned to dance by invisible strings – without ever knowing who is pulling the strings. Ralph Ellison's novel The Invisible Man is full of images of dolls as if to constantly remind the reader that no one is in complete control of their life. The first example of doll imagery appears very early in the novel with the Battle Royal scene. The naked, blonde woman is described as having hair “yellow like that of a circus kewpie doll” (19). Ellison establishes a very strong link between the fate of the black man and that of the white woman. The fact that they are both depicted as puppets or dolls in the work is no coincidence. The woman and the African are merely stage plays for the white men in the novel. Tod Clifton's dancing Sambo dolls are the most striking example of doll imagery. This little tissue paper doll has the ability to completely change the Invisible Man. When he sees that the powerful and enigmatic Clifton is the one peddling the abominable dolls, the narrator is so filled with humiliation and rage that he spits on the dancing figure. But what caused this surge of fury? It is Tod Clifton and not the narrator who has degraded to such a low level. However, it is our narrator's sudden understanding of his own situation that provokes his anger. The line “For a second our eyes met and he gave me a contemptuous smile” (433) illustrates this moment of realization for our narrator. This shows the reader that Tod Clifton was aware of his position as a puppet from the beginning and chose to enlighten the narrator at this particular point in the novel. The Invisible Man recognizes that all his life he has been the slave and puppet of others. Whether those others are Bledsoe, his grandfather, or the Brotherhood doesn't matter, but there has always been an imperceptible rope attached to him governing everything he does. Not only a string, but her own physical characteristics echo those of the grotesque Sambo dolls. His cardboard hands were clenched into fists. The fingers were drawn in orange paint, and I noticed that they had two faces, one on each side of the cardboard discs, and both smiling..