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The Invisible man


The narrator's identity is derived from this relationship, and this relationship suggests to Brockway that his identity is a "threat". However the viewer decides to see someone is the identity they assign to that person. The Closing of The American Mind, by Allan Bloom, explains this identity phenomenon by comparing two "ships of states" (Bloom 113). If one ship "is to be forever at sea, [and] another is to reach port and the passengers go their separate ways, they think about one another and their relationships on the ship very differently in the two cases" (Bloom 113). In the first state, friends will be acquainted and enemies will be formed, while in the second state, the passengers will most likely not bother to know anyone new, and everyone will get off the ship and remain strangers to one another. .
             A person's identity is unalike to every different viewer at every different location and situation. This point the narrator senses but does not fully understand. During his first Brotherhood meeting, he exclaimed, "I am a new citizen of the country of your vision, a native of your fraternal land!" (Ellison 328). He preaches to others the fact that identity is transitional yet he does not accept it himself. Maybe he thought it distressing being liked not for being his true self but because of the identity he puts on or being hated not for being himself but because of his identity. To Dr. Bledsoe, the principal of the black southern university where the narrator attended, the narrator is a petty "black educated fool" (Ellison 141). To Mr. Norton, a rich white trustee of the black university, the narrator is a simple object intertwined with his fate, a mere somebody, he explained to the narrator, that "were somehow connected with [his (Mr. Norton's)] destiny" (Ellison 41). To the organizers of the Brotherhood, Jack, Tobitt, and the others, the narrator is what they designed him to be.


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