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While Morrison describes several African-American experiences of life, what unites all of the characters’ struggles is the need to make their way through entrenched white prejudice. Poor and deprived of schooling, the novel’s black characters have lower expectations of life than their white peers, though they are eager to seize the opportunity to improve their standards of living. For example, Frank feels grateful for the army because it takes him away from Lotus, where “there was no goal other than breathing, nothing to win and, save for somebody else’s quiet death, nothing to survive or worth surviving for” (83). Even when he leaves the army, he is deeply proud of his uniform, dry-cleaning it and preferring it to civilian clothes, because it allows him to pass through the streets without being judged merely as a tall black man, who, in a deeply prejudiced society, is a figure of fear. 

When Frank cannot appear as respectable as he wishes, he prefers to be invisible. For example, on the first Greyhound bus ride he takes on his journey to visit Cee, “Frank dutifully sat in the last seat, trying to shrink his six-foot-three-inch body and holding the sandwich bag close” (19).