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which is that the other fellow always has a life you can't know,
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that it's simply the otherness of any individual person that keeps you
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from knowing more than you can see on the surface.
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It's the otherness, not the racial otherness,
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necessarily, but just the otherness.
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So, in these last pages, otherness gets collapsed back into
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racial otherness, and I think perhaps this is why
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Ernestine emerges as a stereotyped character.
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whether this constitutes a critique of Nathan.
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He is folding an analysis of identity back into racial stereotype,
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an analysis of identity as blank.
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They have no interiority.