A great scene in Invisible Man, and Ellison's weakness

The funeral scene toward the end of the novel is one of the great moments in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man - the IM goes looking for a brother who had more or less disappeared from the movement and finds him near 42nd st. selling tiny black-boy dancing dolls - a real racial insult, that he is, pathetically, trying profit from. While the IM watches, the brother gets in a confrontation with a police officer, who shoots him dead - OK, too many coincidences here, but still - the IM is unable to reach others in the Brotherhood and goes forward w/ plans for a huge public funeral in Harlem. It's one of Ellison's most powerful descriptions - and the oration that the IM delivers is a great piece of memorial rhetoric - a high point, and also low, sorrowful point in the novel - because the next day the leaders of the Brotherhood gather and essentially expel the IM because he went ahead w/ the funeral on his "personal responsibility" and in the Brotherhood nothing should be personal (or emotional) - all decisions must come from the Committee - we really see the Stalinist side of the progressives here, and sadly there were many such groups right up through the 70s. Just before this series of events, the IM is seduced by a white woman who latches onto the fringe of the movement - he's deeply fearful that she may have been assigned to test him or, worse, to set him up for blackmail; not sure if Ellison will do anything further w/ this episode, but she is the least credible, the least full character in this novel - Invisible Man is not really a novel about character, except for the journey and education of the narrator, but it must be said that Ellison is particularly clueless when portraying women.