INTRO An examination of the very heart of experience and meaning, Charles Johnson's Middle Passage examines the structures of identity and the total transformation of the self. The novel talks about the hidden assumptions of human and literary identity and brings to light the real problems of these assumptions through different ideas of allusion and appropriation. As the novel tells it, Rutherford Calhoun's transformation of unawareness allows him to cross “the sea of ​​suffering” (209) causing him to forget who he really is. The novel brings out the roots of human "being" and the true complications and problems of African American experiences. Caught between the questions posed about identity, the abstract body is able to provide important information about the methods and meanings of the Middle Passage. the middle passage. As a survivor of an unknown place and subject to the utter isolation of his own personal experiences, we find Rutherford searching for meaning. The novel questions the structure of human and literary identity by testing the power of oppositions and abstraction in representing the meaning of experience: "Our faith in fiction derives from an ancient belief that language and literary art speaks and shows and clarifies our experience" (Essere 3). By questioning the African American experience, Johnson radicalizes faith and is able to show the complexity of experience and change. Johnson's examination of identity, which we can see as both human and textual, depends primarily on the appropriation of his literal and reflexive methods. This contradictory space of… middle of the paper… they either become “like all other men,” or if not like all other men, they become more like Rutherford himself: “They were leagues from home – nay, homeless – and in Ngonyama's eyes I saw a shift, an emptiness as perhaps all his brothers as he once knew them were dead His eyes, when I looked up, returned the my flat and ghostly image, the flapping sails and the sea behind me emptied of their density like figures in a dream. Stupidly, I had seen their lives and their culture as a timeless product, as a finished thing, pure essence or Parmenidean meaning that I envied and wanted to embrace, when the truth was that they were Heraclitean process and change, like every man, not fixed but evolving and vulnerable to metamorphosis as the body of the boy we had thrown into the sea. (124)”