Dan's paper

In his paper Dan traces the ex-colored's man path to estrangement from society. He starts by looking at the difficulties the narrator faces with deciding which race he belong to. Using Simmel's arguments, Dan very convincingly proves that the ex-colored man is a stranger to both races. The next step in the alienation process is the narrator's journey to Europe where his estrangement becomes not just racial but national as well. He sees himself as an observer of the United States rather than a functional part of it. The last and absolute part of his estrangement is the denial of his past and the change of his name. He is no longer a stranger just to a race or a nation; he becomes a stranger to society.
Dan's paper raises the question about social alienation and how it arises. Simmel looks at the phenomenon of the stranger mostly from the perspective of the group and how the stranger is seen by them. I think Dan's paper does a great job of looking at the same phenomenon but from the stranger's perspective. Social alienation cannot occur without both society and the person playing a role, so to expand the paper, it would be interesting to look at how other people see the ex-colored man, and not just how he sees the world around him.