Quote 7
All my life I had been looking for something and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself questions which I, and only I, could answer. It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man! (1.1)
For a long time, the invisible man was obedient to the various life paths that society laid out to him as a black man, but here he discovers the existence of an invisible identity, an identity that no one can see.
Quote 8
And whenever things went well for me I remembered my grandfather and felt guilty and uncomfortable. It was as though I was carrying out his advice in spite of myself. And to make it worse, everyone loved me for it. I was praised by the most lily-white men of the town. I was considered an example of desirable conduct – just as my grandfather had been. And what puzzled me was that the old man had defined it as treachery. When I was praised for my conduct I felt a guilt that in some way I was doing something that was really against the wishes of the white folks, that if they had understood they would have desired me to act just the opposite, that I should have been sulky and mean, and that that really would have been what they wanted, even though they were fooled and thought they wanted me to act as I did. (1.3)
The positive reinforcement the Invisible Man receives only succeeds in confusing his sense of self. He feels undeserving of their praise because of his grandfather's lasting words, which imply that what he's doing is really treachery.
Quote 9
They were all such a part of that other life that's dead that I can't remember them all. (Time was as I was, but neither that time nor that "I" are any more.) (2.7)
The narrator considers himself to be radically different from the college version of himself – so different that he considers the college version basically dead.