hat he believes satisfy what others want from him, especially what the white society expects him to be. These different characters are poses that play to the prejudice in the white community which sees black males in certain roles and in no others. Each of the roles is supposed to be what the black man needs and wants, but each of the roles also fails this man. He is in reality an individual human being, and none of these poses accepts this fact or makes it part of his reality. He withdraws more and more from outside society, becoming an underground man not unlike the character in Notes from Underground by Dostoyevsky. He becomes invisible to the outside world, but he was invisible even when he was in the outside world. He was invisible as he assumed these roles, for the real person beneath was always hidden and able to look
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