INTROExamining the true heart of experience and meaning, Charles Johnson's Middle Passage examines the structures of identity and the total transformation of the self. The novel speaks to the hidden assumptions of human and literary identity and leads us to see the real problems of these assumptions through different ideas of allusion and appropriation. As the novel tells it, the transformation of Rutherford Calhoun's unconsciousness allows him to cross "the sea of ​​suffering" (209), making him forget who he really is. The novel brings out the roots of human “being” as well as the real complications and troubles of African-American experiences. Caught between posed questions of identity, the abstract body is able to provide important insight into the methods and meanings of Middle Passage. RUTHERFORD'S TRANSFORMATION The protagonist of Middle Passage, Rutherford Calhoun, shows that identity is a dangerous "in-between" experience for the African American offspring who endured the Middle Passage. As a survivor of an unknown place and subject to total isolation from his own personal experiences, we see Rutherford searching for meaning. The novel questions the structure of human and literary identity by testing the power of dual oppositions and abstraction to describe the meaning of experience: "Our faith in fiction comes from an ancient belief that the language and literary art speak and show-clarify our experience” (Age 3). By questioning the African American experience, Johnson radicalizes faith and manages to show the complexity of experience and change. Johnson's examination of identity, which we can view as both human and textual, depends primarily on the appropriation of his literal and pensive methods. This contradictory space where... middle of paper ......o became 'like any other man', or if not like any other man, they became more like Rutherford himself : "They were leagues from home - indeed, without a home - and in Ngonyama's eyes I saw a displacement, an emptiness as perhaps all his brothers as he once knew them were dead . Namely, I saw myself. A man remade thanks to his contact with the crew. My reflection in his eyes, when I looked up, rendered my image flat as phantasmal, the beating sails and the sea behind me emptied of their density like the figures in a dream. Foolishly, I had seen their life and culture as a timeless product, as a finite thing, a pure essence or Parmenidean meaning that I envied and wanted to embrace, when the truth was that they were a process and a Heraclitean change, like any man, not fixed but evolving. and as vulnerable to metamorphosis as the body of the boy we threw overboard. (124)”