“They meant to kill me and they got her instead.”

Coleman insists that everyone involved in disgracing him during the scandal at Athena College is responsible for the death of his wife, Iris Silk. At Iris’s funeral, their estranged son, Mark, confronts his father and insists that Coleman is responsible, not anyone else.

“Thrown out of a Norfolk whorehouse for being black, thrown out of Athena College for being white.”

Coleman mutters this line, and it is the first mention of Coleman’s race. It offers the suggestion that he was considered anything other than a white man at times in his life. It also suggests the fluctuating nature of identity.

“A tiny symbol, if one were needed, of all the million circumstances of the other fellow’s life, of that blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of a human biography—a tiny symbol to remind me why our understanding of people must always be at best slightly wrong.”

Nathan thinks these lines after seeing Coleman’s US Navy tattoo. Appearing so early on in the novel, it can be taken as a hint that Nathan is an unreliable narrator and that his understanding of Coleman will inevitably be wrong.