How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #22
"That is your new name," Brother Jack said. "Start thinking of yourself by that name from this moment. Get it down so that even if you are called in the middle of the night you will respond. Very soon you shall be known by it all over the country. You are to answer to no other, understand?" (14.133)
…and again, rhetoric of rebirth. Some critics have noted that this moment is similar to how slaves were renamed by their masters, highlighting the idea that the Brotherhood is no better than white enslavers.
Quote #23
For one thing, they seldom know where their personalities end and yours begins; they usually think in terms of "we" while I have always tended to think in terms of "me" – and that has caused some friction, even with my own family. Brother Jack and the others talked in terms of "we," but it was a different, bigger "we." (14.187)
The narrator is used to thinking for himself and finds it difficult to speak for an entire group of people.
Quote #24
No, I thought, shifting my body, they're the same legs on which I've come so far from home. And yet they were somehow new. The new suit imparted a newness to me. It was the clothes and the new name and the circumstances. It was a newness too subtle to put into thought, but there it was. I was becoming someone else. (16.6)
Ellison really dramatizes the idea that joining the Brotherhood means the narrator is becoming a whole new person.