Communitarianism and Identity: Insights from Invisible Man

“The conversion of assets into power generates a variety of sanctions, rewards, and instruments to penalize those who resist, to reward those who assist, to remove those who block, and to provide facilities for those who implement a collectively-set course of action.” (Etzioni 357). Amitai Etzioni is an Israeli-American philosopher, his work is mostly encapsulated in the field of socioeconomics. More specifically though, his work in communitarianism is significant. Communitarianism is the philosophy where there is a notional connection between the individual and the community. The subject of communitarianism is ever so present in the novel Invisible Man and is clearly evident when the narrator’s identity is reflected through his interactions with his surrounding community. In the ocular lenses of the narrator, the world is a secular and unequal place in all aspects. It is rigged for those

The most redundant answer to this predicament is someone 's hometown. A hometown is a place a person grew up in, a community they related to and absorbed. In the novel Invisible Man, the narrator’s hometown community is not one to assist in finding his identity. At the commencement of the novel the narrator reminisces on what the community he grew up in provided him, “All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self contradictory. I was naïve,” (Ellison, 15). The community he grew up in was a white supremacist location. There was no identity he could grasp from a place that wanted nothing of him. He had to ask for, he had to listen to, and he had to search for himself. The purpose of a community lending itself to one 's identity is that it does not need to be discovered, it should be