Personal and Community Identity
In Invisible Man, we see the narrator navigating between his personal identity and his community identity. The narrator doesn't really start with an identity, but as he goes through the college, Harlem, and the Brotherhood, he ultimately has to face his invisibility and ask himself who he really is. His solution is to stay in solitude and have some deep self-reflection before going back out into the world, apart from society. But can we develop our own identities within society? In a way, identity is based on society. We say that we are "conservative" or "liberal" in relation to what people assume as conservative or liberal. We say we are "introverts" or "extroverts" based on how we interact with people around us. We define ourselves by using society's dictionary. Our identity is very much shaped by society, yet we often have to question ourselves. "Who am I?" What the narrator did is what many of us may do, although to a mu