s
             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] ¡K 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. They designed for him an ide...