1) Balancing social and personal responsibility
             The central problem the narrator encounters throughout his life deals with the balance between social and personal responsibility. The public and private self of a black man come into continual conflict. Most often, the personal nature of the man is forced to give up his morals and or family values in order to present himself in better light to the white society. Trueblood said, "But what I don't understand is how I done the worse thing a man can do in his own family and 'stead of things gittin' bad, they got better. The nigguhs up at the school don't like me, but the white folks treats me fine" (68).
             Sometimes the split between the two halves is not even visible to the Invisible Man. Racist stereotypes and other people's schemes confound his attempts to know himself. "Here within this quiet greenness I possessed the only identity I had ever known, and I was losing" (99).
             On the other hand, Dr. Bledsoe's personality is revealed in the open at a school assembly as he gives a "swift glance carrying a threat for all" (115). He is subordinate to the white guests out of necessity but exerts his authority brutally over all of the blacks at the school. He will later say, "I've made my place in it and I'll have every Negro in the country hanging on tree limbs by morning if it means staying where I am" (143).
             At a low point, the Invisible Man even thinks, "If you made an appointment with one of them [white persons] you couldn't bring them any slow c.p. (colored people's) time" (163). He feels that he needs to somehow "measure up" to the white man's society by working on his own habits.
             Finally, the separation between his social progress and his attempt to stay in touch with himself became so distant, that "I realized that I no longer knew my own name" (239).
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